Self healing cloud could alleviate security concerns

Fears over security remain when companies and authorities implement cloud based services, claims TechEye.net

According to the online technology news provider fears of major security breaches have not gone away despite governments in both the United States and the UK throwing their weight behind its capabilities and using it in their own state departments’ IT operations.

Just last year Japanese electronics giant Sony had its data breached by hackers, and critics of cloud computing believe that putting important personal information on remote servers is merely inviting cyber criminals to try and gain access.

However, TechEye states that providers are doing their utmost to ensure that the cloud remains a safe data storage option to companies, local authorities and consumers because there is simply too much on the line for the schemes to fail.

“In the US, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) into making security in the cloud water-tight,” TechEye’s Matthew Finnegan explained.

“The researchers are now developing a system which would allow the cloud to identify and recover from an attack almost straight away.”

According to the MIT’s research team, some level of vulnerability is a given with a system which allows such “freedom and fluidity”, however the systems mentioned by Mr Finnegan stop viruses from spreading by closing down the entire infrastructure until a full clean up is carried out.

The researcher believe that the can create a self-healing system which will be able to work out what kind of attack cam in, how to deal with it, and then how to fix the issues caused by it.

This would enable to the cloud to work on its own devices and mean that managing IT operations would become a simpler process for the end user.

John Dunn, security editor of news and reviews website Techworld, recently said that cloud computing is helping many firms move forwards but the problem often faced is working out which kind of system works best for them.

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