IBM CIO, Jeanette Horan, was joined by Guru Rao, IBM fellow and chief systems engineer, at a luncheon on Friday to discuss the company's plans to help their clients utilize cloud services. 

Rao and Horan were joined by IBM client, Professor Giuseppe Visaggio of the department of informatics at the University of Bari. IBM helped Visaggio architect a solution that utilizes cloud technologies in order to help an agricultural consortium in the Puglia region in southern Italy. 

Visaggio said these cloud solutions help small to medium size business - as well as several larger, enterprise-like companies - manage their inventory through the Web. Visaggio said the major issue for these experiments is data security, which must be solved incrementally, something Harvey Koeppel, executive director, Center for CIO Leadership, echoed. 

Koeppel compared security in the cloud to security on the World Wide Web -- eventually it became so ubiquitous that companies had to use it and had to figure out how to secure it. He predicts the same will happen eventually with cloud technologies, especially because of the recent economic crisis. 

Security concerns continue to plague customers however, and according to the speakers, it may be attributed to a lack of education. Some CIOs are unaware of the architected environments or the constraints of older systems, which can present issues in cloud migration. Many seem to be most worried about the lack of control that is often associated with a "virtual" server, expecially after the recent Amazon failure which downed several sites for several days. 

Do you think public clouds will become more popular? How is your company leveraging the technologies? What security concerns do you have?