For a more detailed description of how we chose our winners for our first annual HPC in the Cloud Editors’ Choice awards, please read this post, which provides some necessary background and links to the full list of winners and descriptions

If there is one truism that’s remained a constant for well over five years, it’s that cloud security is the biggest hurdle barring customers from considering clouds in any form. While many academic users see this as secondary to performance hitches, for enterprise cloud consumers, this is a top priority.

There are several companies who are attempting to position themselves as cloud security experts and many more have sprung up in the last two or three years when conversations about cloud security in general were at their height. While this is not to say that they don’t have viable offerings, there are two cloud security leaders that are stepping beyond delivering security in the cloud (which in itself can mean about one hundred things, depending on context) by implementing in-house research to improve their offerings.

We have come up with a tie for this year’s cloud security designations, which can be split off into two focuses—the scientific/technical computing end and the enterprise end. Naturally, Novell falls into the latter category and while IBM's focus is not distinctly academic in nature, we tend to hear more customer stories about IBM from the institution side.

IBM

Few companies have the resources to pool together for massive research undertakings related to cloud security that IBM does. This year the company has released the results of a handful of studies and research efforts that have been focused on making the cloud more secure by examining current threats and finding solutions at the infrastructure level, particularly in the context of private clouds.

IBM has been on the forefront of cloud security leadership with its recent string of investigations into how to make privacy and data protection at the core of cloud computing architectures. In addition to providing a range of insights on the research and product front over the last several years, this year IBM has positioned itself as a thought leader for the cloud to come.

Novell

For large-scale enterprises, we think Novell is making strides to provide cloud security to big businesses via some of its strategic partnerships. Furthermore, what’s caught our attention is that they appear to be spending quite a lot of money on research to improve their current practices.

Novell, like IBM, has been making significant strides to make cloud computing more feasible from a data security standpoint. Its research into the arena of cloud security as well as its line of products are creating a more secure environment for businesses of all sizes and accordingly, they are tied with IBM on the cloud innovation front - we expect more from Novell over the next years as the cloud model emerges in enterprise.

In this photo, HPC in the Cloud publisher, Tom Tabor, presents Novell with the Cloud Security award.