If you have responsibilities for making decisions about cloud computing initiatives for your organization, you won’t want to miss the recent report put out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Guidelines on Security and Privacy in Public Cloud Computing provides an overview of the security and privacy challenges facing public cloud computing and presents recommendations that organizations should consider when outsourcing data, applications and infrastructure to a public cloud environment. The document provides insights on threats, technology risks and safeguards related to public cloud environments to help organizations make informed decisions about this use of this technology.

The document is organized into seven chapters:

- Chapter 1 outlines the scope of the document
- Chapter 2 presents an overview of public cloud computing.
- Chapter 3 discusses the benefits and drawbacks of public cloud services from a security and privacy perspective.
- Chapter 4 discusses key security and privacy issues in public cloud computing and precautions that can be taken to mitigate them.
- Chapter 5 provides guidance on addressing security and privacy issues when outsourcing support for data and applications to a cloud provider.
- Chapter 6 presents a short conclusion.
- Chapter 7 contains a list of references.

The complete publication 70-page publication can be downloaded at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-144/SP800-144.pdf [PDF].

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