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.
We continue today with a look at hybrid and public cloud computing deployment options as talked about in a recent joint presentation with Evolving Solutions and IBM’s Chief Strategist, Don Cotey. In an IBM study, over half of U.S. companies are expressing high interest in adopting many workloads in either public or private clouds.
Hybrid cloud deployments where internal and external service delivery methods are integrated can be broken down into:
Third-party hosted and operated which on the spectrum of private and public clouds is closer to the private end.
Shared cloud services – mix of shared and dedicated resources by different clients, VPN access and membership or subscription based. This deployment brings an organization closer to the public cloud computing end.
A public cloud deployment is when IT activities and functions are provided “as a service” over the Internet and treated as “pay as you go”. Public cloud computing can bring about a great amount of elasticity when scaling is needed.
Security? Privacy? Compliance? They are all legitimate concerns when it comes to public cloud computing. That being said, the public cloud has undeniable benefits. As a utility service, public clouds offer easy and inexpensive setup, scalability for growing needs and a pay-per-use model that eliminates waste.
The public cloud simultaneously solves three resource bottlenecks: power, data processing and access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) without ownership costs. The public cloud essentially becomes a boost for your regular systems, offering additional power when needed and the ability to process large amounts of data that traditional file systems cannot handle.
But back to the cons. There are certainly some very important issues to consider before using a public cloud.
1) You can’t move data between service providers. Companies therefore must ensure that they have selected a public cloud service provider that has a good reputation and the ability to scale based on their needs. Switching providers at a later date is not a viable option.
2) As public cloud computing is available to anybody, the risk of a security breach is much higher. The data may be stored in different locations or even different countries, making it difficult to ensure that private data stays private. Companies must therefore limit the access of individual users and strongly enforce password policies.
3) When using an external service provider, there is always the chance of service outages. If your public cloud goes offline, how long can you survive without it?
Even with all these issues, the economies of scale put public cloud computing at a clear advantage and service providers realize that. It is in their best interest to address key customer concerns and work towards creating a secure and reliable service.
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