Blog Entry

Many “experts” still tout security as the biggest hurdle to cloud computing—specifically, public cloud computing. But, this is only partly true. While security is still a major impediment to cloud adoption, many organizations have not addressed another substantial barrier to adopting the public cloud model: compliance.

Proving Compliance in the Cloud Can Be Tough
Not only do customers need to keep their systems and information secure, they need to prove that it’s secure. That’s the essence of compliance.

When discussing compliance, your customers invariably run into some common questions:

• What information is being stored?
• Where is the information stored?
• Who can access the systems that the information is stored on?
• What level of access do these people have?
• Is this level of access appropriate?

When using the public cloud model, answering the first question is easy enough. It’s the next four that are a bit more difficult, if not impossible, to answer. That’s because, by its very definition, cloud computing obscures the underlying hardware, its location, and who actually has access to it and the information it contains. This situation leaves many cloud providers not able to meet customer compliance requirements.

Partner Opportunities with Identity
Identity is the key to solving the challenges associated with meeting compliance today—and is a huge opportunity for IT solution providers. Identity helps control the risks and challenges of computing across multiple environments because identity powers intelligent workload management (IWM). Through IWM, workloads can be infused with enough intelligence to control who has access to what information and for what purposes as well as adhere to any location restrictions your customers may require.
The opportunity is plain to see: partners can grow their businesses by helping customers adopt IWM and overcome virtually all of their compliance challenges.

The Bright Future of Public Clouds
In the near future, public cloud computing will become as common as wireless networking is today. The appeal of inexpensive, flexible computing that can be dynamically reconfigured at will is simply too great to ignore. Identity and IWM will enable your customers to maximize those benefits by creating workloads that are secure, compliant and portable across physical, virtual and cloud environments.