A few RainStor folk attended CloudCamp London recently and again security dominated the discussion. While there are challenges around securing data in the cloud, it’s not beyond the wit of mankind to find solutions that address the various risk models. (At RainStor we believe we’ve already addressed this concern by adopting a strength-in-depth strategy that uses encryption along every network path and data rest point). The general feeling at CloudCamp was that the cloud exposes the bad design points and vulnerabilities of systems that are often swept under the carpet when they’re implemented behind your own firewall.
There was also some debate about vendor lock-in and portability issues in the cloud. But are these issues really unique to cloud computing? The reality is that many companies face these same issues with the infrastructure, platforms and applications sat in their own data centres. The charge is that many CIOs (and senior IT managers) in large enterprises are thinking too much about their careers and not enough about the risk/reward of cloud computing for the benefit of their shareholders, latching on to any excuse not to put their neck on the block and sign-off cloud projects. As one attendee put it “while the large enterprises wring their hands and make excuses, SMEs are just getting on and doing it”.
One last observation from a RainStor perspective is that there were some fairly naïve comments at this CloudCamp about the impracticalities of keeping multiple copies of data or moving data around the cloud because of latency and upload costs. Again, we think we’ve cracked this problem at RainStor using extreme data compression but a broader point would be that CloudCamp probably needs more contribution from PaaS and SaaS guys so we’re not just talking about how to manage tin in the cloud, but also what are the best practices for managing data and information in the cloud.
(Btw, I also gave a lightning talk on the challenges and benefits of using the cloud for structured data archiving and you can download slides.)