I’ve had a number of conversations with customers and prospects about cloud security recently and have been struck by how divergent people’s views are. Invariably, they fall into one of two camps. One camp, the “server huggers,” thinks the cloud is totally insecure because it is out of their control. These are usually IT people who have spent the last ten years learning the lesson that no vendor can be trusted and convincing themselves that the security requirements of their business are completely unique and unfathomable to anyone on the outside. The other camp, the “cloud hippies,” think that the cloud inherently makes everything good and that by moving apps and functions to the cloud, everything will just work out. For cloud hippies, security is for paranoid people and anachronistic Blackberry users. The reality is that both camps are right (and wrong). The server huggers are right in arguing.