Every solution has its two sides of the coin. We come across various marketing techniques that somehow define cloud computing in relation to the services they provide! In order to jump on to the cloud bandwagon and attract customers, some companies advertise their services as cloud services when in fact these are not! Therefore, what is cloud computing? – We define cloud computing as anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical drawings.
The cloud is not just a cool technology model but it is also a business model. It is a well-known fact that Amazon at the outset, designed the infrastructure for their own use but it evolved into a product or better a service offered as – Amazon’s Web, EC2, S3, or Amazon’s cloud. It is quite evident that now they are trying to increase their revenue by pushing their infrastructure to the limits through new offers such as, – Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. We all heard of power outages, resources that disappear and slower response times that may be a consequence of an overloaded setup. However, through personal experience I can say that these incidents are very rare with big providers such as, Amazon. Remember, that downtime is also possible with in-house solutions!
One common SaaS is email – if the main criteria are costs, then outsourcing email is your best option. Although, big corporations can negotiate favorable agreements with email providers such as, Google – remember that small to medium businesses may not get the same favor! A word about Google email and applications services – it is very hard to get reasonable support and you may need to rely on third-party tools for basic stuff such as, backing up email boxes. In addition, there is no guarantee that user data would be secure and backed up.
All cloud services share the available resources and therefore, you are competing for computer resources with other customers. A good alternative would be to place your assets with two different providers or use the cloud just to scale-up your systems when the demand rises. Although, you may implement all of the security measures provided by the cloud provider and by the systems themselves, there is still the risk of possible intrusion/destruction from neighboring hosts. Neighboring hosts are virtual machines that are running on the same server or in the same data center. One university claims to have a prototype/model that can identify the exact location of a virtual machine and eventually can start a neighboring VM (Virtual Machine) with high utilization that can hook the underlying platform! In the event of using the cloud as a storage provider, implementing data encryption would adequately harden security – read Securing your online backup archives
No cloud standards yet exist! If you are using the cloud as an infrastructure service, it is impossible to move your assets elsewhere say, to another cloud provider without rebuilding your systems from scratch and moving all your data, as virtual machines setups are not compatible from one provider to another. If you are using software as a service then you need to find another provider that provides the same service and data migration capabilities. Apart from all this, one of the major setbacks remains your Internet connection – so before contemplating to use cloud services make sure to invest in a good and reliable Internet connection, otherwise, you will be disappointed!
