Universities score $3M NSF grant to study cloud computing security and privacy
No sooner had I finished editing colleague Ellen Messmer’s story on cloud computing security skepticism (based on her interviews with IT pros, industry analysts, vendors and security experts) than I came across an announcement of a $3 million NSF grant awarded to three universities to study cloud security and privacy.
Boston University, Brown University and UC Irvine researchers will use the grant to examine how the cloud might be made more trustworthy.
“Developing the right mechanisms for the specification and verification of trust-enhancing service-level agreements in the cloud will avert conflicts among cloud market stakeholders,” says Azer Bestavros, lead principal investigator and professor of computer science at Boston University, in a statement. “Doing so will also improve the utility and hardness of our cyber-infrastructure, with significant benefit to our economy and society.”
Among other things, the researchers will look at the feasibility of extending cloud service-level agreements to address such things as outsourced services and data leakage. They’ll also look at ways to ensure cloud customers that computations performed on their data in the cloud are legit.
Researchers from vendors such as NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, RSA and VMware will collaborate with the university researchers.
Also read: Cloud security basics and IT shifts to the cloud, anecdote by anecdote
