innovation

More Clouds with a Chance of Storms

Question:  What exactly are the top security issues that cloud vendors need to address?

Somehow I am getting a sense of déjà vu on cloud security.  Don’t get me wrong folks, but the cow is already out of the barn.  After all, more than 69% of all consumer Internet users have used at least one cloud service in the past year and that doesn’t include the nearly 100% of all consumers who are using web mail services such as Gmail, Yahoo and others of their ilk.

On the other hand, businesses and enterprises are not rushing to jump on the cloud computing band wagon in the same kinds of numbers.  So what is holding companies back from taking the very real advantages that cloud offers?  We can argue that business requires a higher level of security and validation than the average consumer, but the simple answer is really a large dose of inertia, fear and doubt.  That is, all the usual reasons that businesses use as excuses to wait for the consumer products and service to prove their worth before committing precious corporate IT resources.

In a survey conducted by IDC in August 2008 and June 2009, concerns about security topped the list of challenges for 88.5% of the respondents, followed closely by performance (88.1%) and availability (84.8%).   Clearly security is a major impediment to a cloud architecture implementation for many organizations.  It will need to be properly addressed before cloud architectures will be fully embraced by the business community.

Cloud security issues can be divided into three major categories, business, regulatory and technical.  Business issues generally can be quantified as risks to the business in whatever form.  Major business concerns for the enterprise include:

• Legal issues related to the control and protection of intellectual property and sensitive business information
• The difficulty of establishing end to end business data validation
• Regulatory issues related to data ownership and proper handling procedures
• A perception of increased potential for data and business loss
• Risk of reduced data or systems availability
• Proper integration of the mix of secured data residing both in the cloud and on the internal corporate networks

The major global regulatory issues that influence technical and business decisions around cloud computing architectures include:

• Rising consumer data protection laws around the world
• PCI Compliance and the need to ensure end to end data protection
• Banking regulations

It is clear that many of the business and regulatory issues can be addressed with properly secured cloud architectures, applications, networks and systems, but cloud and network security is quite complex.  It encompasses such diverse disciples such as networking, application development, database architectures and designs, hardware architectures, and systems design.  Many standard network security best practices developed for the enterprise are inadequate to handle the new cloud architectures.  However, by taking a network services approach to the architecture of cloud services, there are many advanced methods that can be used to address cloud security issues and allay most if not all of the business owners concerns.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.

Looking for Business Innovation in all the Right Places

Question:  Where are the next major innovations in IT going to be coming from?  With the continued squeeze on businesses to run more efficiently, what do you see as the biggest market drivers?

Unless you have been buried under a rock for the past few years, the answer to this question should be obvious.  Practically all of the revolutionary products and hot services that everyone is talking about are being developed directly for the consumer sector.  Yes, business has been happy to cautiously adopt innovations; only after they have proven themselves in the brutal crucible of the fickle mass market.  Think about all the great new products that have come out in the last eight years, wireless LAN, Instant Messaging, Web 2.0, social networking, MP3 players, PDA technology, flash drives, and cloud computing, (yes even cloud computing, which is mostly a means for Google and Amazon to recoup some of their investment in excess capacity) are all examples of technologies that originated as products designed for the consumer market that have since been adopted by the enterprise.  The truth is that there has been essentially NO IT innovation created directly for the business market for many years.  Unless you count virtualization and mass storage hardware, which I would argue are mostly reinventions of the very old ideas of the service bureau and the mainframe respectively, on faster hardware.

Looking deeper into the economics of emerging technology, it becomes obvious why innovation is coming mostly from the consumer sector.  Follow the money.  While the risks for venturing into the consumer market are extremely high, — ask Apple about the notorious Newton, a product clearly far before its time.  The rewards for catching the fancy of the consumer cannot be matched by anything in the enterprise market.  Apple’s iPhone, a far more sophisticated Newton successor, is a good example.

My crystal ball says the next big thing will be developed for and marketed to consumers first.  Small and mid-sized business customers, for better or worse, are now lumped with consumers.  Since the fragmented and notoriously cheap SMB market has always been a hard nut to crack, it is easy to see why it makes logical sense for vendors to build consumer grade products and assume small companies are willing take whatever they are given.  With the current tight economic environment, permanent transfer of corporate R&D to the startup model, and limited resources available for innovation, I expect to see this trend not only continuing but accelerating for the foreseeable future.

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.  IT infrastructure consulting services.