The Next Phase of the Cloud Revolution: Reliable and Secure Clouds

Musings on cloud computing technology trends

The rapid growth of Amazon’s EC2 and other cloud service providers is testament to the obvious benefits of cloud computing – cost effectiveness and scalability. However, many barriers remain for the cloud model to truly gain widespread adoption in the enterprises, and that is because there are still major issues with the model: Reliability and Security. For example, several incidents with the Amazon Cloud infrastructure have affected many startups and popular websites, such as Quora and Reddit. It has become clear that with the rapid growth of such a vast cloud infrastructure, outages are bound to happen due to its sheer scale and complexity.

While most cloud providers offer 99.9% or 99.99% up time in their SLA, it is important to have failover and backup measures, especially for mission critical software, or mass-consumed websites. Furthermore, much like the idea that data backup has to be “offsite” and even off-region, the most effective failover solution is to allow the porting of the whole application or website to another cloud, whether it is with the same cloud vendor or with another vendor. Right now, vendor lock-in is one of the major concerns with enterprises moving to public clouds, as each of the major cloud providers stipulate the proprietary types of virtual images and applications that can be run on their clouds, forcing the potential cloud migrants to choose just one or another. Thus, having inter-vendor portability and vendor-agnostic cloud applications will be a welcome development that will simplify cloud adoption.

Another major barrier to more rapid cloud migration was cloud security governance, especially on a “public” cloud like Amazon’s that is very different from a private cloud or a virtualized server farm that most enterprises are using nowadays. Seamlessly integrating the local information systems support with the cloud vendor’s internal controls is another key milestone that will prove that public clouds can be properly managed and secured with best practices IT management systems as in the enterprise. Amazon’s nuts and bolts approach means that their customers have to figure this out, while most other cloud vendors like Joyent or Heroku have been very focused on the technology/startup segment that do not have such needs.