Security and privacy still issues for cloud

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Cloud computing may be the hot topic in technology right now but an Intel fellow has warned there are still questions that need to be answered before full scale adoption becomes a reality.

During a panel discussion with a number of fellows at IDF 2010, Kevin Kahn, Intel senior fellow and director of the communications technology lab, claimed the questions marks hovering over security and privacy in the cloud were yet to be dealt with.

“We really have a lot of questions to answer about how cloud computing rolls out, particularly in the area of privacy and security,” he said.

“[For example] what exactly is the legal status of your data if you are using a cloud service that happens to put one of their data centres in France? You are a US citizen perhaps, you think you are dealing with a US company, but because of the time of day, the maintenance schedule of the data centre here, your data happens to be in another country. What is your legal status?”

He claimed this was just one example of the questions that remained and added: “We really have to get our arms around this worldwide if we are going to answer some of these privacy and security questions long term.”

“There are some complicated issues to answer before this all rolls out.”

Unlike many of this year's technology conferences, IDF has remained relatively quiet around the cloud computing topic. However, key sponsors like HP and EMC have used 2010 to focus their strategies towards the increasingly popular model.

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