HP claims cloud datacentres are a 'bulls eye' for hackers

FLOGGER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP has said that clouds are bigger targets for hackers than traditional datacentre server deployments.

Talking at a round table on cloud security, HP was asked whether cloud deployments are easy to hack, to which the firm replied "yes, there is a lot of compute resource that you can get your hands on", adding that cloud deployments are like "painting a bulls eye" on the datacentre.

HP pushed the notion of datacentre consolidation, rather than having many less secured datacentres. HP said that the datacentre "will come under more attack", however it added that more security procedures should better protect users' data, saying, "there will be a lot more protection" in those datacentres as firms concentrate all their effort into a single site.

The problem is that while centralising all of your data might allow firms to focus effort and resources on a single site, it has the rather obvious problem that if there is a security breach, everything is exposed. HP said that security is still a combination of preventive measures and fire-fighting, which will no doubt fail to calm the fears of those who have had their data stolen in recent high profile security breaches.

HP does have a point about creating 'high quality' datacentres that are well defended, however there is no way it can avoid that fact that there are significant risks to placing all your eggs in one basket. But to that end, HP claimed that it always pairs the datacentre. However, surely such an approach simply doubles the attack surface. µ