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I had the pleasure of hosting Enrique Salem (CEO Symantec) today as part of our Britt Technology Impact Series.  This year the series is focused on cloud and we have already had a fantastic line-up of speakers from infrastructure providers (Peter DeSantis of Amazon), service providers (Kent Parker of Ariba), the enterprise user side (CIOs of Nestlé, Bechtel, and Hilti), and the startup space.  Each speaker this year has pointed to security as an issue in the cloud.  So it was fantastic to have Enrique speak to that concern.  He argued that while security should not be taken for granted, it is not a show-stopper.  In fact, he argued that many firms would be more secure in the cloud than running their own IT.  His bigger concern, particularly for consumer cloud services, is privacy.    “You can’t control what users put out themselves” and once it is out there, it will be there forever.

Besides security, Enrique noted that the hype around the cloud has created many myths including:

• There will be a “big switch” – He argued that the switch will take more time than many believe and that enterprises will maintain a substantial IT infrastructure far into the foreseeable future.
• Cloud computing is IT commoditization – Rather than commoditizing the role of enterprise IT, the cloud will focus the IT organization on higher value-adding business activities.
• Cloud comes in a box – He argued that “cloud in a box” offerings are overpriced and that firms should focus on assembling low-priced commodity components.
• Customers are moving to “the” cloud – There is no such thing as “the” cloud.  Rather the cloud is a collection of publically available services.

View the video highlights of Enrique’s talk: