Neil MacDonald

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Neil MacDonald
VP & Gartner Fellow
15 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry

Neil MacDonald is a vice president, distinguished analyst and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research. Mr. MacDonald is a member of Gartner's information security and privacy research team, focusing on operating system and application-level security strategies. Specific research areas include Windows security…Read Full Bio

Coverage Areas:

← →

Cloud Security and VPNs

by Neil MacDonald  |  March 25, 2010  |  4 Comments

I remember when Microsoft first introduced PPTP virtual private network technology and sparked a debate about whether or not the Internet could be securely used for remote access. Nowadays, we take VPNs for granted. If you think about it, with VPNs we’ve given up control of the pipe (the Internet), but it doesn’t mean we have to give up control of the data in the pipe.

The same will be true of cloud-based computing services if we do it right. We can give up control of the pipes, the servers, the data centers, the applications and so on – as long as we keep control of the data.

Isn’t that what information security is ultimately all about?

If we control the outcome (e.g. service level agreements, security protection, etc) then do we really need to control how the outcome is achieved?

Just like I am looking back 15 years later after the advent of VPNs, I believe in 15 years we’ll look back and wonder what all the fuss was about with using Cloud-based computing resources.

4 Comments »

Category: Cloud Next-generation Security Infrastructure     Tags: ,

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Tweets that mention Cloud Security and VPNs -- Topsy.com   March 26, 2010 at 12:40 am

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kyle Johnson, Toshio Matsuda. Toshio Matsuda said: [Gartner] Cloud Security and VPNs: I remember when Microsoft first introduced PPTP virtual private network technol… http://bit.ly/a9A4ek [...]

  • 2 What We’re Reading, Week of 3/22 « VPN Haus   March 26, 2010 at 10:07 am

    [...] Week of 3/22 By vpnhaus Leave a Comment Categories: Highlights Gartner Blog… Cloud Security and VPNs Neil McDonald remembers the debate over whether or not the Internet could be securely used for [...]

  • 3 Guard Yourself in the Cloud « VPN Haus   March 31, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    [...] Categories: Endpoint Management and Rethink Remote Access Before you dive in to the cloud, make sure your network is secure and managed!  We are seeing enterprises and SMBs everyday [...]

  • 4 uberVU - social comments   April 5, 2010 at 1:26 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by ToshioMatsudaE: [Gartner] Cloud Security and VPNs: I remember when Microsoft first introduced PPTP virtual private network technol… http://bit.ly/a9A4ek...