AT THE launch of Apple鈥檚 iCloud service last week, Steve Jobs promised to 鈥渄emote鈥� those workhorses of modern life, the PC and Mac. That鈥檚 because cloud computing can liberate those devices, along with smartphones and others, offloading the burden of number-crunching and storage onto distant data centres.
But the cloud is vulnerable (see 鈥�Botclouds: a cyberattacker鈥檚 dream鈥�). Within its nebulous frame, it appears to be relatively easy to mount cyberattacks and commit fraud.
The cloud is a welcome development, but if these loopholes exist, what others might there be? If cloud providers like Google, Amazon and Apple want us to trust them with our digital worldly possessions they must monitor more closely what is happening on their servers; measures such as closing criminals鈥� accounts after the event are not enough.
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Greater collaboration with credit card providers and other companies targeted by cloud criminals could help ensure a safe and reliable service. Cloud computing will provide great advantages, potentially so great that we must not allow it to be subverted.