RSA president embraces cloud computing

By EgovAsia Editors | Mar 10, 2010

During the opening keynote address at RSA Conference 2010, Art Coviello, President of RSA, The Security Division of EMC urged his colleagues in the security industry to embrace the challenges and opportunities presented by increasingly virtual infrastructures and adopt a more expansive security vision by focusing on the IT transformations associated with cloud computing. Industry leaders Dave Cullinane, Chief Information Security Officer at eBay, and Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer of VMware provided commentary in the areas of secure cloud and virtualized computing environments.

“Something is holding back the full realization of this cloud vision. And that – in a word – is security,” said Coviello. “With 51% of CIOs citing security as their greatest concern surrounding cloud computing, security has not kept pace with the evolution to the cloud reflected in today’s increasingly virtualized and hyper-extended enterprises. We have severely diminished vision as a result and it shows. In short, people everywhere must be able to trust the cloud even if they literally and metaphorically can’t see it.”

The 15-year information security veteran noted that having a virtual abstraction layer embedded in the technology stack provides the industry with a rare opportunity to get a security ‘do over’ capable of providing even better security than we have in physical infrastructures today. As a result, organizations can shift from infrastructure-centric to information-centric policy and concentrate on what is most important – the information and who gets access – rather than a meaningless perimeter or mere plumbing.

During the address Coviello encouraged the industry to work towards facilitating private cloud infrastructures that are secure, compliant, and governed in a manner that provides confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information.