Outlook: Cloudy with a chance of security challenges and improvements

Cloud computing presents an opportunity to offload computing to third party resources, but this business model isn't without security risks. Customers must determine if running their computing on a base system managed by a third party is better than running on their own systems. They must be convinced that running in the same data center as their competitors or adversaries is safe, and they are still responsible for complex security configuration. Despite these concerns, cloud vendors can also leverage the cloud architecture to improve security by building verifiable base systems, designing integrity-protected cloud services, and limiting security configuration complexity. Thus, while the cloud architecture provides security challenges, there are also opportunities to ease the security configuration burden on customers.