Open source cloud offers another route to better security

The news that IBM is going to shift all its cloud services and software to an open cloud architecture comes as no great surprise. After all, it had already signalled an intent to open up the cloud when it joined the OpenStack Foundation last year as a 'platinum' sponsor and then went on to contribute to the codebase. The announcement will, of course, be a real boost for the whole open cloud movement when those 5,000 or so IBM private cloud customers are migrated to an OpenStack-based architecture. It may not be surprising, after all IBM has needed to do something strategically if it is going to ever really be able to compete with AWS, but is the move to open standards secure?