Today, in a Computerworld article entitled, “Security still top concern with cloud, despite Amazon outage,” Jaikumar Vijayan stated,

Despite the heightened focus on cloud availability and uptime caused by Amazon’s prolonged service outage last week, security will likely remain the bigger long-term concern for enterprises.

Kyle Hilgendorf, a cloud computing analyst at Gartner reminded us that we need to plan for emergencies:

Amazon portrays an aura of invincibility, whether intentional or not, and this outage is going to remind enterprise customers that nobody is perfect and increased due diligence is required.

However, Hilgendorf said that security is really the more pressing concern.

I still consider it to be the bigger, long-term concern. Enterprises I speak to are more concerned about security than they are about availability, reliability or performance.

Jonathan Penn, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that last week’s Amazon outage is sure to stoke enterprise anxiety about cloud performance and uptime, but security is still going to be the bigger worry for most enterprises.

Companies that are looking to move applications to a hosted cloud environment are going to want even more availability assurances from their vendors now.

Ultimately though, enterprises need to realize that there can never be 100% uptime in a cloud environment, just as there can never been continuous availability within an enterprise data center.

Failures of the sort that happened last week will happen again, and it’s up to enterprises to ensure that they have measures in place to mitigate any resulting service disruptions.

Over the longer term, the thornier issue for most companies will continue to be data security. Forrester’s clients have consistently rated security as their top concern with cloud computing, ahead of other issues such as performance and availability.

It looks like we in the information security industry still have our work cut out for us.