Communicat.us

In my morning “digital mail bag” was a pointer to The Register’s article on Oracle, Sun, and the departure of their CTO for cloud. In the article, they describe Lew Tucker as “former vice president of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange applications market place; had been with Sun for less than two years and was handed the role of building out Sun’s hosted cloud.” You can read the whole article here.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with representatives from a number of government agencies and much of the conversation surrounded cloud computing. What was evident were a few things:

• nearly everyone is investigating cloud options
• “cloud” is an over used term and means everything from raw CPU and storage to hosted custom applications to hosted commodity services
• most of the use cases were for cloud versions of traditional solutions – aka the cloud was just a different deployment option
• traditional thinking means traditional requirements and hosted clouds do not always meet those requirements
• exploiting cloud computing to its fullest will occur as new programs are designed and fulfilled but there are starting points today

The common thread was that having flexibility was critical. Some commodity capability could go into a public cloud. Low risk capability could go into a hosted cloud. By far, the private cloud has the lower threshold of adoption (independent of cost or complexity) as it is easier to trust.

While “cloud” may be an over used term, it is clear there are both current use cases and new thinking for solution design to take better advantage of flexible options. The silver bullet of a “cloud” is it’s ability to smooth out load. The larger the cloud the more balancing that can take place. This starts the balancing act. A private cloud will be smaller than a public cloud. If the private cloud is only servicing one type of solution, then it is likely to surge and idle all at once. However, a service cloud is quicker to leverage than an infrastructure cloud.

• Software as a Service clouds benefit from large diverse user populations
• Platform as a Service clouds benefit from lots of diverse applications
• Infrastructure as a service clouds benefit from lots of diverse compute requirements

So, what do you need your cloud to do ?

credit: JulianBleecker

Cloud computing has many interpretations and one of them is a rebranding of "hosting". In reality, cloud computing tends to get broken into three layers:

1. Software as a Service SaaS) – hosted solutions, individual applications, and integrated packages of capability targeting end users
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) – a packaged set of services onto which tenants (customers) build their own solutions for their own end users
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – raw platform infrastructure such as operating system or even just CPU, along with storage; giving the tenant (customer) the responsibility  of building their system and then deploying it to the IaaS.

How secure is the data in the cloud environment ? That depends of three factors:

1. how secure is the storage
2. how secure is the access
3. how many people have permitted access

There are known quantities and technologies for storage and access. A recent announcement by IBM demonstrates the importance of these issues and the continued research into improvements …

IBM researcher Craig Gentry has proposed a method for manipulating data while leaving it encrypted. That could be big news for cloud computing, for antispam solutions, and for health care providers … [it] enables encrypted data to be manipulated so that, when decrypted, the result is as if the operation had been performed on the unencrypted data — an approach that makes it especially suitable for some types of security."

The third dependency – how many people have access – may be variable and outside the control of the customer. If the Service Level Agreement (SLA) does not stipulate separate and isolated infrastructure then the number of people with permitted access to the service is equal to the total population of all tenants. One solution is for a tiered SLA, allowing the customer to opt for more isolation as a high price point. Of course, this starts to negate the benefits of cloud for the provider, hence the need for pricing tiers that go along with the SLA isolation tiers.

In the end, the consumer needs to make a conscious decision on how much control they retain in the cloud vs the benefit of the outsourced responsibility and resources.