Pulling up the drawbridge: protecting yourself against cyber attacks Part 2: Cloud computing

Key Points:

Assessment, accreditation, and good governance will keep your cloud services as secure as possible.

Many public and private sector organisations around the world, including in Australia, are currently using cloud services to enable their business and this trend is likely to continue. You and the people around you also interact with cloud services, probably on a daily basis - if you use online banking, social networks or email accounts such as Gmail or Hotmail, you are using cloud services.

Cloud computing has been defined as "a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (eg., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." Bypassing the technical language, cloud computing is essentially the delivery of computing services over the internet.