Dispelling the security myths of Cloud Computing

(06/10/2009)

Many organisations are turning to Cloud Computing to help them cut costs, to quickly access new technologies, to increase service levels and to help focus on growth in a period of difficult economic circumstances. What makes cloud computing appealing for UK businesses is that it mitigates the financial and operational risk normally associated with implementing on-premise IT solutions.

As the subject of ‘Cloud Computing’ and what it really means rises in popularity, there has been continued debate on its relative merits and advantages. This debate was sparked by the high profile performance issues of Internet services such as Google’s gmail which suffered a major outage, leaving many users without access to their email for up to three hours. At the time Google seemed to be under attack as they suffered a number of security breaches in close succession, raising concerns on whether cloud computing is a robust platform to deliver software and services.

It is a mistake to regard all cloud computing services as the same. It is particularly important to differentiate from ‘free’ and mainly consumer services, such as Google against those that are business grade and specifically designed with high levels of resiliency to service corporate clients.

As well as the consumer services we all know so well, cloud computing is also delivering fit-for-purpose, business grade services. Such offerings give access to enterprise level applications (such as email) and communications infrastructure (such as converged networks) without the need for any capital outlay and are charged at a low fixed monthly cost. This makes IT easy to budget for as costs are predictable with no nasty surprises.

One of the main reasons why businesses may be hesitant to move to a cloud computing service is because they may not trust the vendor has the required levels of security. The reality is that data is like money. The safest place for our money is not under the mattress but in a bank, where we have the access we need but someone else is ensuring it is safe. The same is true for company sensitive data, as few organisations can replicate the levels of security, resiliency and round the clock monitoring to keep systems operating in their optimum state 24/7.

CIOs are proactively moving company data away from the business and into data centres for this very reason. The need for increased power density, driven by virtualisation, and greater levels of security is driving data out of the business and into the data centre with the added benefit of promoting remote access from anywhere so that staff can securely access applications and data from anywhere and at any time.

Ensuring the businesses infrastructure is secure, scalable, available and managed around the clock can be expensive and time consuming to manage in-house. Yet by outsourcing services be it security, email or other applications such as CRM that are available via the Internet, businesses are guaranteed a team of dedicated experts who will be monitoring the infrastructure around the clock, monitoring and fixing issues before they have a chance to impact on service levels. They do the simple, tactical tasks so you don’t have to and help give you more time to act strategically. IT must become more strategic in order to add value to the business rather than just run increasingly expensive and complex, in-house IT systems.

When looking for a service provider one of the first things to ascertain is how good the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is. When it comes to scrutinising SLA’s beware of those that do not hold up against what businesses want and need. Some claim to offer 100% uptime on the network but their definition of the network may not include the Internet connection. Others promise to replace a broken server but don’t mention restoring the data from backup, if a backup is included. These could lead to a business suffering from serious downtime and loss of business. Any service must be delivered with an SLA that is appropriate for the business, with all exceptions clearly stated.

It can be hard to find genuine savings from within your IT budget. However, cloud computing services do provide access to the latest technologies at a fraction of the cost and without the management overhead of doing it in-house. With a fixed and predictable cost, delivering measurable productivity benefits, it’s hard to discount the powerful argument for the ‘cloud’.

Star has launched a new business Guide called “Cloud Computing, what does it really mean?” to help UK businesses have an insight into how IT services, delivered via the Internet, can help them. The free Cloud Computing guide can be downloaded from: www.star.co.uk/cloud.

Related topics:  Application and software security   Internet and Web security   Network Security 

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