CS1805

life in the cloud
SUN OR RAIN, BRING IT ON!
IS THE CLOUD RIGHT FOR EVERYONE? THAT, SAYS ONE LEADING OBSERVER, IS THE
WRONG QUESTION. "LIKE ANY EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT, IT'S OUR CURRENT
REALITY." BUT WOE BETIDE THOSE WHO FAIL TO TAKE EVERY SECURITY MEASURE
As a child, many of us would look into
the sky and stare at the clouds. We
would see shapes and our brains
would interpret them as images of animals
or objects. We wondered what it would be
like to stand on the clouds and wondered
what the view would be from high above.
These are all memories and made us think
of the word 'cloud' in a positive way, says
Morey J. Haber, CTO, BeyondTrust.
"At some time, we may have seen the
other side of clouds. We have experienced
thunderstorms, turbulence when flying and
seen the devastation from storms. These all
come from clouds and weather, and can
make you have a miserable or wonderful
day. While the word 'Cloud' is different for
technology than the weather, the analogy
can help us understand the positive and
negative aspects for information technology
'in the cloud'. Technology professionals
will generally agree the positive aspects
do outweigh the potential negative
shortcomings, but they may be more than
your business can handle." To that end,
suggests Haber, decide if the following
could impact your Cloud weather:
Forecast for a Sunny Day in The Cloud
(Positive Aspects)
Organisations can reduce costs by no
longer a dedicated environment, raised
floor and optional licences for operating
systems and applications
Businesses can have the ability to
dynamically burst capacity of the
network, processing and other resources
to meet demand. As your business
grows, and events occur that require
more resources (like the holiday season),
a cloud implementation can temporary
(or permanently) scale to meet those
objectives
Environments can simplify the capability
to test, implement and deploy various
resources from operating systems to
applications. They can also potentially
reduce costs for hardware by subleasing
computing time on traditionally
expensive hardware
The cloud can meet multiple
infrastructure objectives from SaaS, IaaS
and PaaS, with shortened times for
deployment and flexibility
Cloud providers can centralise contracts
for licensing, provisioning and additional
resources, since they are all being
serviced through a sole source.
Forecast for a Stormy Day in The Cloud
(Negative Aspects)
Cloud providers can experience outages
like any environment; but, as a user of
the cloud, you are at the mercy of the
cloud provider to restore services.
Service Level Agreements (SLA) are the
only recourse for a vendor to recoup
partial losses during an outage
Choosing a cloud provider can lock
you into their platform and not allow
portability to another platform, if the
business or technical needs arise
Financial and business longevity of the
cloud or service provider (SaaS) can
create issues, if your business is critically
dependent on their services. If they are
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