Cisco CEO: clouds "inevitable," security a "nightmare"

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From an article late last week at CSO Online, news that Cisco CEO John Chambers is optimistic about the future of cloud computing (which is good given his company’s recent UCS announcement), and realistic about the infrastructure challenges in making it all work

Speaking during a keynote address at the annual security confab, Chambers said that cloud computing was inevitable, but that it would shake up the way that networks are secured. “You’ll have no idea what’s in the corporate data center,” he said. “That is exciting to me as a network player. Boy am I going to sell a lot of stuff to tie that together.”

However, he added, “It is a security nightmare and it can’t be handled in traditional ways.”

And he wasn’t the only guy with gloomy visions of spilled data on his mind

“I think it’s really going to be a focal point of a lot of our work in the cyber security area,” said Ronald Rivest a MIT computer science professor and noted cryptographer, speaking during a conference panel Tuesday. “Cloud computing sounds so sweet and wonderful and safe… we should just be aware of the terminology, if we go around for a week calling it swamp computing I think you might have the right mindset.”