Google Pursues Government Biz: Security Concerns Loom

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The results are consistent with previous Unisys surveys on the same topic and with what the company has been hearing from clients, said Sam Gross, vice president, global IT outsourcing at the company. "For us [the results] are not surprising," Gross said. "We have been surveying our customer base and doing quick polls for a long time. The numbers are always different, but never the ranking," Gross said. "Security continues to be the number one concern for cloud computing."

Many of the concerns are related to issues such as inadvertent access to enterprise resources in a shared cloud infrastructure and accidental release of protected data. Another big concern has to do with the level of access that a cloud provider might have to an enterprise's systems and data, Gross said.

"They want to know how a cloud provider can assure that an administrator within a shared cloud infrastructure cannot gain access to or view their data," Gross said.

In a report issued earlier this year the World Privacy Forum raised other privacy issues that can arise when a government agency outsources to a cloud provider. For example, a federal agency that uses a cloud service to host personal data could violate certain provisions of Privacy Act of 1974, especially if it doesn't have provisions for protecting the data in its contract with the cloud provider. In addition, federal records management and disposal laws may limit the ability of agencies to store official records in the cloud. The location of a cloud provider's operations may also have a significant bearing on the privacy laws that apply to the data it hosts, the report noted.

Such security concerns bubbled to the surface recently, when several groups protested a $7.25 million plan by the city of Los Angeles to replace its Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office applications with Google Apps. Though city IT officials reiterated their plans to go ahead with the project, and Google itself has vigorously defended its security controls, the incident highlighted the continuing concerns with cloud computing.

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