I noticed an August 2, 2010 article from the University of Texas at Dallas that should be of interesting to anyone focusing on cloud computing: it describes a collection of recently-released tools to help application developers build more robust and secure cloud applications. The article is titled “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing.”

The tools basically consist of security features on top of open-source tools that are frequently used to build cloud-computing apps: Apache’s Hadoop distributed file system, Google’s Mapreduce and the University of Cambridge’s XEN Virtual Machine monitor. The research team at UT Dallas has focused on tools that will provide secure query processing, as well as tools that store sensitive data in encrypted format in order to add security to data storage devices.

The work is based on a project being carried out for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and additional steps are being planned to include the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as various intelligence agencies and other companies. Demonstration of the tools is already under way at King’s College London and the University of Insubria in Italy.

It’s far too early to tell whether this particular set of tools will become widespread, commercialized, and “mainstream.” But the fact that the research and development is underway, and that it’s being sponsored and supported by such prestigious organizations, is promising. As the article says, “the biggest obstacle to wide adoption of cloud computing is concern about the security of sensitive data,” and the work underway at the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research Center encourages me to hope that we will have robust tools in the not-too-distant future, with which to build cloud-based systems that organizations and individuals can trust with their most sensitive data.