The Real Cost of Cloud

Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing

But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.

While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they will have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services.

The 4 biggest threats facing the cloud

Earlier this week, portions of Amazon's cloud computing service crashed, impairing Foursquare, Netflix and Instagram as well as millions of users. While service was quickly restored, it marked the second major incident of its kind in the last six months -- and that is raising concerns with some.

Putting parts or all of your company in the cloud -- the oft-used term to describe large, remotely hosted data sets and applications -- is typically far more cost-effective than relying on traditional servers and internal IT departments. But, incidents like these can also bring a cloud-hosted company to its knees.

Cloud computing is obviously here to stay. But, here are four ongoing issues to watch out for as adoption rises:

• Outages
• Security
• Servers
• Confusion

Dropbox cloud was a haven for data thieves, researchers say

Researchers who presented their work at Usenix Security Symposium say they had developed the exploits last year but gave Dropbox time to fix the problems before making the exploits public.

First they managed to spoof hash values that are supposed to identify chunks of data stored in Dropbox's cloud. Dropbox checks these values to see if the chunks are already stored in the cloud and if so just links them to the account of the user who sent the hash.

By spoofing hashes, they were able to have Dropbox grant them access to arbitrary pieces of other customers' data, say the researchers from SBA Research in Austria. Since the unauthorized access was granted from the cloud, the customer whose files are being distributed didn't know it was happening, they say.Real