Saturday, September 15, 2012

Trusting the Cloud

A significant amount of nervousness surrounds the prospect of using cloud services. Part of this can be chalked up to unfamiliarity with using cloudbased capability, but some of it is goes much deeper than that.

CSC, the global systems integration company, was quick to recognize this issue and first used the term trusted cloud to define the kind of environment that many organizations would want and expect from a cloud service provider.

The trusted cloud includes services that are
✓ Secure
✓ Transparent of control and result (whether it provides a full customer interface so that you can see how everything functions)
✓ Able to provide evidence that systems operate as advertised (whether it definitely meets the services levels it is supposed to be providing)

An organization might have many concerns in moving systems into an IaaS environment, but these are the primary ones.

Although companies clearly trust their Web sites to cloud providers, they’re much less likely to trust their mission-critical systems to the cloud. Secure cloud data centers exist. In a way, this type of trusted cloud is similar to what outsourcing specialists and managed service providers offer (plus a cloud customer interface that puts the customer directly in control).

Clearly standards will emerge in time so customers can select cloud services without making significant technical changes to either software or data. At the moment, however, no established standards exist, so those organizations moving systems into the cloud need to be concerned not just about the preceding points, but also about overall control of their systems.

The IaaS customer needs to be able to integrate all systems and software running in the cloud with other corporate systems and manage the whole as a single unit. This kind of orchestration of systems is a new challenge in many areas, particularly in managing performance and managing security in a coherent way.

Source of Information : cloud computing for dummies 2010 retail ebook distribution

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