Compliance May Hinder Cloud Early Adopters, Warns Provider

Compliance rules may keep some applications off the cloud for the near future, but most users have plenty of other applications they can put there, says Savvis – a service provider due to launch a cloud infrastructure service next year.

“There is industry-level debate, and no blanket answer,” said Bryan Doerr, CTO of Savvis in an interview with eWEEK Europe, warning that applications including those bound by the retail industry’s PCI regulations may be kept off the cloud for now because users cannot guarantee to meet thse requirements. 

The issue of cloud compliance has become a hot one. Cloud providers are increasingly able to argue to users that the security and reliability risks can be overcome, but may have a harder time proving it to regulators whose rules restrict IT use in specific industries, such as the PCI rules in retail.

However, most companies have some internal applications that are not bound by heavy regulations, and can benefit from putting these on the cloud, said Doerre: ” Any typical enterprise has a portfolio of hundreds of applications. Cloud could be part of the answer.”

Next year, Savvis is due to launch Project Spirit, a virtual private data centre based on  Cisco’s Nexus switches, part of the Unified Computing System, launched in March, and VMware’s vSphere cloud OS, launched in April.

eWEEK Europe chaired a seminar on Compliance at BrightTalk’s online web summit about cloud security, which is still available online. You can read more of our interview with Doerr here.