Monday, September 07, 2009

Cloud Computing (It's new era or just another buzz word)

Before writing this small para I was just thinking what's a subject line. Was thinking what should I document for my future reference. But amazing as I started to jot down Ideas and concept started popping up in my mind.

Before discussing it further about my Idea let's understand what is cloud computing in very simple language.
For Technocrats : Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
For Financial Geeks: Style of computing where organizations CAP-Expenses are very less and Organization get the optimum OP-Expenses.
For Indians: The first academic use of this term appears to be by Indian Prof. Ramnath K. Chellappa who originally defined it as a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.

Simple funda usually every one don't prefer to own a cow for milk.

Who are service providers and who are clients ?
The "big four" of cloud computing services are said to be Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com
Cloud computing is also being adopted by individual users through large enterprise customers including General Electric, Procter & Gamble and Valeo.

Benefits
  1. Agility improves with users able to rapidly and inexpensively re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
  2. Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure.
  3. Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile).
  4. Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.
  5. Scalability via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads.
  6. Sustainability comes about through improved resource utilization, more efficient systems, and carbon neutrality.
  7. Security typically improves due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc.
Aha now some one asked me is it secure, you are security professional and taking in favor of Cloud Computing ?
Believe me my first reaction was oh yes I am Security SPOC and I am not thinking abt security. But after a small research concluded that it's not actually a security issue. But perception issue. Cloud computing is not favorite of CTO's because they are not interested to let it go.


Let's take a challenges why organization/enterprises are hesitating to adopt it.
Once we will identify the challenges we will itself get an answers to those question. I am able to arrive some solutions as a concept for resolution security issues. I know after a two years theses concept will be practical and currently not able to get any published white papers in those lines. But yester years dreams are reality now . So hope some day some one consider that I also think Innovative get the answers of some of the toughest questions.
Geopolitical Issue
The Cloud spans many borders and "may be the ultimate form of globalization." As such, it becomes subject to complex geopolitical issues, and providers are pressed to satisfy myriad regulatory environments in order to deliver service to a global market.

Legal Issues
Concern persist about security and privacy from individual through governmental levels (e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act, the use of national security letters, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act's Stored Communications Act, HIPPA and EU-PII etc).

Answers to concern is ?
Hybrid solution :
Self Managed + cloud or Service provider 1 + Service Provider2 and ease of portability of applications and data.

Let's take an example of patient private data which contain his/her demographic, images, history and many such info. Now organization who are owners by law has to ensure that patient data is stored and transmitted securely. Solution is design a encrypted database table where each patient data stored and retrieved from cloud should require a access decryption key which is hosted in hospitals owned infrastructure. In relation to data stored on cloud just a key information is very little fraction. Once data access key is released by hospital server, Nurse/Doctor/Patient can view/modify their own records present on cloud.

It's just an example which I am able to think. If you have any other challenging question or problem I would love to discuss its solution.


Different Type of Service Offered on Cloud by Service Providers
  1. IaaS : Infrastructure as a Service Include STaaS: Storage as a Service, HaaS : Hardware as a Service
  2. SaaS : Software as a Service
  3. PaaS: Platform as a Service
  4. New Concept is Developing called DRaaS: Disaster Recovery as a Service

At the end of this note like to add a very good presentation on Cloud Computing @
http://www.spinnakerlabs.com/CloudComputing.pdf
http://media.govtech.net/GOVTECH_WEBSITE/EVENTS/PRESENTATION_DOCS/2008/Illinois_DGS/230CloudComputingTEOH.pdf
http://blog.processmaker.com/files/2009/02/cloud-computing-presentation-feb-09-brian-reale.pdf
http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/docs/HannaCloudComputingv2.pdf


1 comment:

Mayank Trivedi said...

The Guru has posted it right there and I was looking around the world for the concepts of Cloud Computing


Cheers