Fear is irrational, or at least our reactions to it often are. Such fear is routinely manifesting itself when it comes to the topic of the Cloud Computing security "challenge." The idea of having virtualized systems located, say, along the Columbia River or on some previously foreclosed property in Iceland generates a fear that is not present with similar systems in Building 3.

Bill Trussell, managing director of security research at TheInfoPro, a New York-based IT market research and consultancy firm, was quoted along these lines in a recent article, originally published by Network World: "When asked whether organizations would extend functions such as user access and provisioning, or two-factor authentication, to cloud providers, it wasn't too popular."

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Well, there's no quantification there, but I'm sure TheInfoPro could provide it. Certainly, this fear will be a boon to anyone who is providing consultancy services to enteprise IT these days, as well as to marketers of security solutions, and to conference producers as well!

But to throw up the security red flag instinctively would be wrong. Cloud Computing has a momentum behind it, due to the inherent logic of IT power as a commodity, a utility, a service. Let the providers take on the capex. And no, this won't kill off the IT hardware industry. If anything, it will make the companies smarter, as they deal with increasingly demanding customers.

Let's check our fear at the door, and move toward addressing the issues one by one, steadily and tediously, just as they've been addressed by enterprise IT managers for decades. Cloud Computing changes everything by changing nothing; on-site management must still create and enforce policies, capacities must still be planned and managed, and RAS will be with us forever.