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Cloud Computing Now and the Future

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Cloud Computing Now and the Future Troy R. Barrett INF 103 Computer Literacy Tarik Iles January 6th, 2013 Cloud Computing Now and the Future The use of cloud computing creates a growing interdependence among both public and private sector entities and the individuals served by these entities. This paper provides a snapshot of the advantages of cloud computing and the risk areas specific to cloud services which clients of cloud services should be aware of. The future of cloud computing is certainly exciting, but moving more of our lives online means we will inevitably have to consider the consequences. Cloud computing means dependence on others and that could limit our privacy because …show more content…

The monthly cost for this company would be $1449.41 per month. This could be much more cost affective for a company than buying the hardware and storing the information themselves. The only question is, how safe is this information that is being stored? The risk of cloud computing could be the security of the information being stored by a large company like Amazon. It is still unclear how safe out-sourced data is and when using these services ownership of data is not always clear. In a study done in 2009, a team of computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego and Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined the widely-used Amazon EC2 services. They found that ‘it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure, identify where a particular target VM is likely to reside, and then instantiate new VMs until one is placed co-resident with the target’ (Ristenpart et al. 2009: 199). This demonstrated that the research team was able to load their eavesdropping software onto the same servers hosting targeted websites (Hardesty 2009). By identifying the target VMs, attackers can potentially monitor the cache (a small allotment of high-speed memory used to store frequently-used information) in order to steal data hosted on the same physical machine (Hardesty 2009). Such an attack is also known as side-channel attack. The findings of this research may

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