Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2013

Another year has passed by and we are still left desiring a lot of changes in the cloud computing scenario because until last year we did not see too many changes in the cloud computing scenario except for a lot more glitches, some major shutdowns, acquisitions and a couple of technical changes that do not have a lot of impact on the way the wannabe cloud computing customer approaches cloud computing. However, it is speculated by pundits and experts met a lot of changes are going to happen in the cloud computing scenario in 2013. So, what exactly are those?

• The cost of cloud computing services is definitely going to come down. This is more like the egg and chick problem because more demand is going to bring down the prices and again sumptuous pricing strategies are going to gravitate more people to cloud computing. As of now it can be said that since small and medium-sized businesses have already started realizing the benefits of cloud computing, so more and more people are going to get interested and that percentage is going to be so high that the cost of services is going to come down tremendously. It has been speculated that 30% of all medium and small sized companies in the United States are going to shift a significant part of their business to cloud computing so that they could reduce the cost of software licenses, upgrades, hardware and servers by at least 10 to 40%.

• Cloud computing is going to start capturing the mobile phone arena. Well, this had to happen someday because mobile phones are no longer considered as communication devices – they are more like personal assistants offering a great amount of space, applications and everything else that could make life easier. If cloud computing replaces storage chips, that could literally change the entire cloud computing scenario!

• Earlier, the focus for many cloud computing companies was to get inside the minds of small sized business owners. This year, cloud computing companies are going to focus more on getting business out of large and medium-sized companies and that again is going to create the most necessary paradigm shift for the small sized business owners.

• Cloud computing security is definitely going to change this year. A lot of investment has gone from several different companies and all of them are trying to make cloud computing a more secure platform. Quite amazingly even though there have been a couple of instances of security breach, only about 3% of information technology professionals are seriously bothered about security risks associated with cloud computing! That simply means that cloud computing is going to become a household name.

• Cloud computing infrastructure is going to improve and it is speculated by experts that software as a service is going to experience a sea change so that companies can analyze and share more data more easily without having to worry about security issues.

• The experts also believe that it’s time the cloud computing companies started thinking about real-time customer requirements and offering solutions accordingly. That’s definitely going to happen and customers might no longer have to pay for bells and whistles – it would be literally a pay and use model.

Image courtesy of watcharakun at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Source:Internet 

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Balancing in the Cloud: Performance vs Security

It seems most companies understand opportunities that cloud computing solutions and services open up for them, especially for SMBs. So now the question sounds like: how to choose a good provider and the right one for your company and to what extend cloud computing services should be used. The complexities are numerous – issues such as security management, attack response and recovery, system availability and performance, the vendor’s financial stability and its ability to comply with the law, all need to be considered. There may be a number of advice and tips formulated with this regards (some are taken from CIO article):
1) Choose trusted providers. Today it exists a number of cloud tech companies to choose from and new ones go live each month. Despite this for cloud services it’s better to stick with trusted and solid companies. To name a few: Microsoft, Google, Intuit, Dropbox, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce. These are companies with deep pockets and dealing with security, and your data is an important part of their business.
2) Distribute between free and paid accounts. For storing financial or alike information paid accounts are preferable. For less critical data and applications free accounts of big trusted cloud service providers may work well. For instance, Google can afford to offer decent free accounts because their business is well-established and their free services just act as bait aimed at attracting new users and then gently pushing them towards paid services and premium accounts.
3) Select the right apps and data for the public cloud. Some businesses, mainly start-up companies, begin using the public cloud for all applications, including mission-critical apps and their data. However, public clouds are neither for every organization nor for every application: what can be subject to the default security provided by most cloud service providers are websites, application development, testing, online product catalogs and product documentation.
4) Evaluate and add security if it makes sense. CSPs can provide significantly different levels of public cloud security. The ISO/IEC 27000 series of standards provides guidelines for evaluating this. If necessary security measures that are used in an organization’s internal private cloud may need to be extended to their public cloud instances, and some cloud products like CloudSpan allow doing this.
5) Get use of the third-party auditing services. When comes to security compliance, organizations need not simply take the CSP’s word for it. Third-party auditing services can be used to audit and then compare to the promised ones.
6) Add authentication layers. Most CSPs provide good authentication services for public cloud instances. Some products like Halo NetSec can help add an additional layer of authentication. Before doing this you need to weigh the benefits of better public cloud security against the costs of increased network latency, possible performance degradation and additional points of failure.
7) Weigh additional security effect on integration. Adding on top of default security by CSP may affect overall application performance and identity and access management. It’s especially important to consider if you work with mission-critical application that need to integrate with other business applications.
8) Make security guarantees from SLA clear for yourself. Public cloud security guarantees with CSPs should be clearly stipulated as service level agreements in the contract, so make sure that transparent monitoring and reporting functions are available to you as a customer as well as security processes, procedures and practices are transparent and verifiable so that you may rely on this information.
9) Streamline logging and monitoring. Comparing one CSP’s logging and monitoring practices with another before you sign a SLA may reveal subtle differences in the security that’s provided so it’s another key to ensuring public cloud security.
10) Add encryption. You may want to employ your own encryption instead of or in addition to the ones provided by the CSP. A number of installable products or SaaS vendors can do this type of encryption on the fly. (VPN-enabled cloud instances fall under this category of augmented public cloud security.) When this happens, only the customer and the third party know the key; the CSP does not.
11) Spread outages risk with multiple even redundant CSPs. Despite cloud provisioning tools these days come already integrated with leading CSPs, it’s possible to spin up additional instances of servers with multiple CSPs automatically on demand: they are turned on if average CPU utilization reaches a certain threshold and turned off once utilization drops. Also when spinning up additional instances, it may make sense to use different CSPs in a round-robin fashion.
Thus, as you may see, experience of using cloud services may be adjusted and improved through following some advice. What’s crucial is finding a balance between cloud security and performance. Naturally there’s always a tradeoff when adding layers of security may be at the expense of application running slower and potentially adding points of failure. Figuring out the right balance between security and performance, though being difficult, is a must-have to run a strong business today.

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