Cloud: Where you gonna keep your gold?

Last week, I was presenting a session on Cloud Computing: Balancing Economics & Innovation organized by NASSCOM Emerge Forum for SMEs.

While I was able to create excitement by demonstrating The Economics of Cloud Computing; >95% of the senior executives were concerned on the security. I said hold on till Eureka! – It was the last section of my presentation along with audience poll. I asked 2 questions:

“You gonna buy a house or rent one?”
“Where you gonna keep your gold?”

The response to the last question self-answered most of the security concerns.

I was also very satisfied about the fact that - audience was able to discuss the trade-offs involved in the decision making about cloud vs. other options. This gave me immense pleasure because - before the session, when I asked a question “How many of you think that cloud computing can benefit you?” - I did not find great response; I said I will repeat this question towards the end also.

Summary

I preferred to answer the questions in non-technical way as I saw the room was full-of the people, who are more business oriented than technology, multiple decision makers from emerging companies and several others from large organizations.

I said – “in my opinion while the security related concerns are genuine, it is more of perception problem than technical one. Everything that you can do in traditional approach for security; you will be able to do (tomorrow if not today) on cloud also.” What you might not get today is a physical key to your datacenter. But over-a-period of time, you might get that too with a private cloud at service provider premises – the definition of private cloud may accommodate this use case to strengthen ROI models – I am just guessing.

The most of the audience was comfortable with putting their gold investments in bank safe locker or “something similar to that” – it was an obvious argument; however I took the other-way-round; less than 5% was ready to keep the gold at home! The common thing between all of them was – “they need a physical key, and no compromise on that”; they were OK with a shared key as in case of bank safe locker.

Did you miss this event? You can attend a similar event organized by NASSCOM EmergeOut Forum at Delhi, find details here, Thanks a lot to Avinash (Regional Director, NASSCOM Northern Region) for sharing it.

Also, share your thoughts (am I inviting trouble?) on security on cloud - perception & reality.