Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Even though conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosby, sees it differently. Tim Greene’s interview with Crosby is the basis of his article “Godfather of Xen: Virtualization holds a key to public-cloud security” on Network World.

A fundamental characteristic of virtualization is isolation, the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context. It can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, says Crosby, a creator of the open source hypervisor and a founder of startup Bromium, which uses Xen features.

Isolating processes more finely can boost security in public cloud environments, he says. “I think one will be to create a highly secure cloud system which can be used to deliver multilevel secure systems,” he says.

If he’s right, public clouds will become more secure and businesses will be more likely to trust them. The need for private and hybrid clouds, along with their costs, will disappear.