Empirical Findings
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enhances its offers and uses bigger or more planes. In addition the airline industry
invests in regional airports and the expansion of hub infrastructure, to guarantee a
higher degree of mobility in the future. This is comparable to the constant growing
amount of available cloud services, implied by a trend towards cloud: Huge servers
farms are established, which need to process a continually growing amount of data.
Any trip bears certain risks, which are prevented or at least minimized in a
comprehensive manner: no driving without a valid license, speed limits, safety
standards for airplanes, technical security checks, as well as checks of the roads
(
equals infrastructure) and participants in traffic. However accidents happen and
cannot be excluded. Everybody is aware of that. Whereas the risks in road traffic
partially lie in the hands of each traffic participant, a passenger on an airplane
completely depends on a third party. On the basis of the amount of accidents, car
driving is by far more dangerous than any flight. A similar situation also applies to
cloud computing. Compared to datacenters on-premise, professional cloud service
providers guarantee a much higher technical security level. Unlike the flight
passenger, a cloud service user still bears certain responsibilities. Due to the fact
that the cloud user is the owner of data, he is responsible to comply with regulations
and policies. Although the technical and security level is quite high, it is still a
challenge to meet legal and data protection requirements. Currently there is no
international harmonization available, which is a critical issue, because the majority
of cloud service providers are US-based. The German government and other
European institutions operate under high pressure to establish a harmonized
framework for data protection laws. Similarly to a car or airplane, an external auditor
needs to check, if certain technical and data protection requirements are met. This
check is based on test standards from an independent institution. An example for
such a check is the EuroCloud Star Audit certificate, which is awarded to cloud
service providers that meet certain requirements. Back to the starting point, it would
be fatal canceling the business trip to Milan because of safety concerns and as a
result losing a great contract. The same goes for companies that waive for cloud
service opportunities because of security considerations. In the worst case scenario
they might lose their competitive edge. When it comes to cloud services, there is no
place for either blind faith or too great fear. Self-responsibility combined with
