Earlier in September we had an in-depth conversation with Chris Drake, CEO of Firehost - an emerging supplier of secure cloud computing infrastructure services. In this 20 Questions session, Chris shared his views and practical experiences with bringing to market a secure cloud offering.

Related Recent Reports and Comments:

Video Replay of the "Battle of PaaS Evangelists July 25 2012"

Is Security a Barrier to Cloud Adoption?

On July 25th 2012 MGI is hosting a webinar on Platform as a Service (PaaS) trends.

Platform as a Service or PaaS is being touted as the express elevator to faster development, integration and deployment of Cloud applications. In the past, integration middleware was largely the domain of large companies as it required a significant upfront investment. Integration costs often added upwards of 60% of the total cost of a business application. PaaS promises to transform the economics of cloud application integration and delivery. Is PaaS a fundamentally new, must-have technology with a clear ROI or is it just a repackaging of old concepts retro-fitted for the cloud?

In several research reports over the past year we have focused on the role that security plays in the rate of cloud adoption. On a couple of occasions we pointed out the functional gaps that exist in many typical cloud offerings. It has also been our point of view that any actual or perceived shortcomings in security are not likely to meaningfully hold back the current adoption trajectory for the cloud. The question is can this adoption trajectory change significantly if the actual and perceived level of trust for the cloud is elevated by additional security features and/or new standalone and more secure offerings? In our view any improvement to cloud security capabilities, creation of security standards and improved transparency will catalyze cloud adoption amongst many current skeptics.