Hidden in the clouds: The impact on data security and forensic investigation

The world is fast embracing cloud computing. Gartner describes cloud computing as “a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT capabilities are provided as a service to multiple customers using Internet technologies”. Many analysts attribute the renewed interest in virtualisation to the economic depression in the period 2008-2010 that led to shrinking IT procurement and maintenance budgets. The opportunity to save money by outsourcing computing services and the ability to exploit associated efficiencies have driven the cloud computing industry to what it is today. A number of service providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM, who exploited the large scale virtualisation of services have built very successful cloud computing platforms. VMWare has become one of the most successful virtualisation software platforms and claim that 100% of Fortune 100 companies trust VMWare as their infrastructure virtualisation platform. Forrester research forecasts that the cloud computing market will be more than $300 billion by 2011. It is estimated that of the Fortune 500 companies have moved their data on to the cloud. Those who move on to the cloud clearly understand the economic benefits. However they do not know where their data on the cloud is or if the cloud provider will provide water tight guarantees that their data is safe.