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Cloud Computing: a question of trust, availability and security

In spite of many advantages like scalable processing power or storage space, the acceptability of Cloud Computing will stay or fall with the faith in the Cloud! I am pointing out three basic facts Cloud providers would be faced with, when they are offering their Cloud Computing services.

Availability

Using Amazon services or Google apps does not give you the same functioning guarantee as using your own applications. Amazon guaranteed 99,9% availability for S3 and 99,95% for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Google also promised an availability of 99,9% for their “Google Apps Premier Edition” including Mail, Calendar, Docs, Sites and Talk. In February 2008 Amazon S3 was down after a failure and Google was even affected by a downtime in Mai 2009. Just looking back to the undersea Internet cable which was broken last year and cut off the Mideast from the information highway, Google, Amazon etc. are not able to promise these SLAs, because they have no influence for such problems.

Companies must carefully identify their critical processes from the non critical ones first. After this classification they should host the critical Move ones within their own datacenter Tool and maybe sourcing out the non critical ones to a cloud provider. This might be a lot of work but could be a benefit.

Cloud providers must care for an anytime availability of their services. 99,9 % availability is a standard by now and advertised from any service provider – but for a Cloud Computing service it is to insufficient. 100% should be the goal! The electric utility model might champions be a good pattern in this case. It’s not as simple as that! But then, a company won’t use Cloud services/ applications for critical business process if the availability is not clear.

Security

Keeping crucial data secure has always been a high priority in Information Technology. wholesale mlb jerseys Using Cloud Computing, companies have to take A their information outside their own sphere and basically transfer them through a public data network.

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are essential which closely describe how Cloud Computing providers are planning and organizing on protecting the data. This may cause a lot of cheap jerseys litigations someday, if any company did not take care of the information.

A hybrid Cloud might be a good solution to avoid those kinds of problems. The company operates on a Private Cloud for crucial information stored within the own datacenter and uses the Public Cloud of a provider to add more features to the Private Cloud. Secure network connections are indispensable in this case and meet a today standard. This approach does not solve the problem of knowing what alse happends to my information I am sending into the “blackbox”.

Trust

Carry on the last sentence above there are doubts about what might happen to the information in the Cloud as well. Regarding to the data management and local data privacy, brewery many companies such as insurance or financial institutes seeing a lot of problems using Cloud Computing. Using a Private Cloud is no issue, but a Public Cloud doesn’t even enter the equation. This is due to the fact that insurance companies are handling with social data and no letter may not be written or stored on an external system. Insurance companies subject to supervision of many national laws. For example, the data of a german insurance company may cheap mlb jerseys not be hosted on an american host.

Faith and local laws are big hurdles for Cloud Computing. If a word of data abuse in the Cloud gets out to the public, an irreparable damage will be the direct consequence – maybe for the whole Cloud!

By Rene Buest

Rene Buest is Gartner Analyst covering Infrastructure Services & Digital Operations. Prior to that he was Director of Technology Research at Arago, Senior Analyst and Cloud Practice Lead at Crisp Research, Principal Analyst at New Age Disruption and member of the worldwide Gigaom Research Analyst Network. Rene is considered as top cloud computing analyst in Germany and one of the worldwide top analysts in this area. In addition, he is one of the world’s top cloud computing influencers and belongs to the top 100 cloud computing experts on Twitter and Google+. Since the mid-90s he is focused on the strategic use of information technology in businesses and the IT impact on our society as well as disruptive technologies.

Rene Buest is the author of numerous professional technology articles. He regularly writes for well-known IT publications like Computerwoche, CIO Magazin, LANline as well as Silicon.de and is cited in German and international media – including New York Times, Forbes Magazin, Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Wirtschaftswoche, Computerwoche, CIO, Manager Magazin and Harvard Business Manager. Furthermore Rene Buest is speaker and participant of experts rounds. He is founder of CloudUser.de and writes about cloud computing, IT infrastructure, technologies, management and strategies. He holds a diploma in computer engineering from the Hochschule Bremen (Dipl.-Informatiker (FH)) as well as a M.Sc. in IT-Management and Information Systems from the FHDW Paderborn.

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