There's a lot that Hurd likes about the cloud environment, but he told attendees at Gartner Inc.'s Symposium/ITxpo Tuesday that more before cloud services, specifically those located outside the firewall, can offer enough security.

"There is whole set of things from a security perspective that, frankly, have to be overcome to make sure we can keep the momentum going," Hurd said of cloud computing's potential.

Citing the 1,000 hack attacks fended off daily, Hurd said "it's unlikely we would put anything outside the firewall that was material in nature, that we couldn't just 100% secure."

He acknowledged that there are many external cloud services that do work, particularly consumer services, but said most of the risk is on the credit card companies.

Another problem with cloud is that it is too technical a term, and there's a need "try to break this down into simple, clear services," he said.