Though security is still a concern, economic forces will prevail in pushing companies into the cloud.
Despite concerns about security, companies almost certainly will move steadily toward some version of cloud computing for one simple reason: it can save them money on rising power costs.
The inevitable increase in the cost of electricity and the challenge that utilities are having meeting rising demands for power will almost certainly drive companies toward their own unique version of cloud computing. Security infrastructures and procedures will, inevitably, be developed to support the move to the cloud—simply because they must.
That is the conclusion one draws from listening to CIOs who are tasked with the challenge of containing costs in today's slim-margin economy. Take Yahoo! as an example of one of the larger companies that has embraced a cloud infrastructure. The company reported recently had 32 data centers running between 350,000 and 400,000 servers. While all those servers are consuming power and producing heat, the energy consumption could be even greater with a conventional (rather than cloud) infrastructure, given what Yahoo! is doing. For one thing, it is serving some 10 billion ads per day across its global infrastructure.
Compared to the average company, those numbers sound huge, albeit excessive. But Yahoo! says it is actually saving electricity compared to what it would be consuming if it didn't rely on a cloud-based architecture. According to Yahoo! CIO Michael Kirwan, the company has been recognized by the Obama administration for its green IT data centers and is actually saving some 10,000 megawatts of power through its reliance on cloud computing. Don't think that number is what a couple of flashlights might burn on an overnighter in the woods. The average U.S. nuclear generating station produces between 500 and 1300 megawatts of power, so the savings Yahoo! claims to have achieved from cloud computing is the equivalent to the electricity produced by more than 10 nuclear power plants. Needless to say, that's a lot of juice—or joules!
Of course, Yahoo! is the company that also served up former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's email contents to now convicted hacker David C. Kennel in 2008 (Kennel was convicted by a federal jury last April of misdemeanor unauthorized access to obtain information from a computer and one count of obstruction of justice. He was found not guilty of wire fraud, and an identity theft charge was dropped following a mistrial). So maybe Yahoo! is an example of a green company using cloud computing that has had security challenges. Since the Palin incident, Yahoo! has taken steps to beef up its security, but it is the first to admit that it takes only "reasonable steps to protect your information," adding that "no data transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure."
That sort of assurance is insufficient for most CIOs or security officers, and most today will only go so far as to consider a private cloud and nothing as broadly based over the Internet as what Yahoo! offers to the public. Chris Young, senior vice president of products, technologies, and markets at RSA, the security division of EMC, said during a press interview at this year's EMC World conference that moving to the cloud is more of a journey than a destination. "I think that most organizations get the basics of the private cloud and what that can mean for their organization," he told eWeek's Eric Lundquist. "I think what they're struggling with is: how do I get there?" Young concludes that there is no "final destination." Companies must add capability and leverage the right external cloud environments, based on economics, manageability, policy, and compliance requirements.
What the cloud should mean to organizations, he says, is "cheaper, more flexible IT infrastructure." What it should not mean, says Young, is "no more physical IT infrastructure." Nor does it mean a company should "run everything out on a third-party cloud environment."
Moving to a cloud environment means that a company's environments can connect together and the company can decide how it wants to manage its IT assets. Above all else, however, Young says that whatever approaches a company takes toward cloud computing, its security model must support it.
"The security model has to support that requirement of how do I make it cheaper and easier to manage," says Young. There must be a way to view and manage the entire security and compliance infrastructure when incorporating physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Not only must the IT department have an overall grasp of the security infrastructure, but it must be able to articulate and demonstrate to upper management, and auditors if necessary, how it has secured the company's cloud as well as physical environments.
While most companies will not have 10,000 nodes in a cloud environment, there are many that may wish to connect a couple of data centers in a private cloud configuration in order to serve seamless applications across all platforms to all users. The developments in cloud architecture appear to hold great promise of doing so at a lower cost, provided security is the first concern.
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