Martin Mackay, vice president and general manager EMEA at VeriSign, presents "Trust in the cloud: trends and opportunities".
The WHIR is reporting live from Germany at WebhostingDay 2010. Stay tuned to our news, features, blogs and WHIR tv for more updates from the event.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Martin Mackay, vice president and general manager EMEA at VeriSign (www.verisign.com), began his presentation by offering an antecdote about his wife calling the IT industry “ridiculous” for coming up with confusing names like cloud computing.
He used this as a device to bring up the common confusion within the industry over trends and growing hype.
Looking at names like software as a service, cloud service provision, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service, Mackay argued how confusion these terms can be to a non-technical
audience.
He chooses to give the cloud his own name of “Nirvana in the Cloud”, meaning working within an ideal technology environment.
Mackay listed the cloud’s benefits such as faster time to deployment, lower capital costs, flexibility of pay per use, and convenience, beneft from the new support model, and green IT.
But Mackay covered both sides of the cloud to take an objective approach and discussed the many areas of risk of placing information into the cloud, such as privileged user access, data segragation, regulatory compliance, physical location of data, availability of service, and recovery.
It is here where he begins to touch on his presentation’s theme, “Trust in the cloud: trends and
opportunities”, arguing that developing and maintaining trust is a crucial aspect of cloud adoption. More importantly, Mackay says there is an increasing need for trust in the cloud.
Citing Stephen M.R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust, Mackay talks about Covey’s coefficient of trust, the concept that “speed increases and cost decreases as a function of the level of trust which exists”.
He explains that if you can increase trust within the cloud, you can increase the speed of adoption and decrease the technology’s costs.
Ultimately, MacKay stresses that without trust, no one will want to purchase products and services from a company.
This leads to his sales pitch for VeriSign, “bringing trust to the cloud” through its SSL certificates and Secured Seal services.
MacKay then discussed the VeriSign Trust Seal service, which VeriSign first announced at last month’s Parallels Summit 2010 in Miami.
The service is designed for owners of non-ecommerce websites who are looking to develop a trusted reputation. MacKay also pointed out that the service will be available for reselling in May.
