Cloud Forensics Research

Just came back from a full day conference of Cloud Computing Summit 2010 and was very happy meeting old and new colleagues from the industry.

Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon gave the morning keynote. Amazon is still leading the cloud market and technical innovations worldwide thus I was really excited to see Dr. Werner Vogels in person.  Dr. Giles Hogben, Programme Manager & Network Security Policy Expert, ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) gave the afternoon keynote on security risks and benefits. ENISA has issued one of the best whitepapers on cloud security risk analysis. Another very well written security white paper is from CSA (Cloud Security Alliance). The afternoon panel discussion on security was of great interest to me, especially when the panelists mentioned the forensic perspective, which echos many of my own thoughts.

Today’s conference was more about leveraging cloud computing rather than cloud adoption. Cloud computing is steadily becoming mainstream. I have been trying not to be too isolated in the research world, and attending business conferences as such is a good way for me to keep updated about what is going on in the current market.  Yet as a researcher, it is also vital to stay ahead with a vision of long-term architecture and developments. From today’s discussions and conversations we all agreed that there is much to do in the field of cloud forensics, yet first thing first is to break down this complex issue to a manageable scale. As Dr. Werner said, we are still on Day 1 of cloud computing technology, and I believe this is a unique time for the industry to prepare itself with a good foundation of security infrastructure with a joint effort in order to ensure sustainable growth.

Keyun