Friday 12 March 2010
There are several kinds of Cloud Computing service offerings. Here are the most common ones. Common Services. Some products offer Internet-based services—such as storage, middleware, collaboration, and database capabilities—directly to users.
SaaS. Software-as-a-service products provide a complete, turnkey application—including complex programs such as those for CRM or enterprise-resource management—via the Internet.
PaaS. Platform-as-a-service products offer a full or partial development environment that users can access and utilize online, even in collaboration with others.
IaaS. Infrastructure-as-a-service products deliver a full computer infrastructure via the Internet.
DaaS. Desktop-as-a-service which utilize virtualization of desktop systems serving thin clients.
The National Security Agency is taking a cloud computing approach in developing a new collaborative intelligence gathering system that will link disparate intelligence databases. The system, currently in testing, will be geographically distributed in data centers around the country, and it will hold ”essentially every kind of data there is,” said Randy Garrett, director of technology for NSA’s integrated intelligence program, at a cloud computing symposium last week at the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College. The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data. Analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools.
The NSA effort is part of Intelligence Community Directive 501, an effort to overhaul intelligence sharing proposed under the Bush administration. Current director of national intelligence Dennis Blair has promised that intelligence sharing will remain a priority. “The legacy systems must be modernized and consolidated to allow for data to actually be shared across an enterprise, and the organizations that collect intelligence must be trained and incentivized to distribute it widely,” he said in response to questions from the Senate prior to his confirmation. The new system will run on commodity hardware and ”largely” on commercial software, Garrett said. The NSA will manage the arrayed servers as a pool of resources rather than as individual machines.
Cue a chorus of commentary alleging how this shows that if you want to keep stuff private, don’t put it on the web, period, because cloud security is not ready for prime time and nothing is secure on the net. OK, so let’s go back to storing confidential company documents on laptops that people leave in cars or forget on trains, or transferring them on computer tape and CD-ROMs that couriers deliver to the wrong address, or backing them up to USB sticks that go missing, or forgetting to wipe them off the hard disks of office servers when we dispose of them (UPDATE: see Michael Krigsman’s post on the same topic for a catalog of examples). Cloud security is no different from real-world security. It’s just a matter of identifying the risks and containing them.
Users really like the convenience of the cloud — far too much for them to give it up — but the trouble is, they also like the convenience of authentication using a simple username-password pair. They haven’t yet figured out that’s far too little to separate your confidential data from a nefarious interloper, especially when the Web means that authentication will work from anywhere, which dramatically increases the threat level. Now it’s up to cloud providers to inflict the same pain on their users — for their own sake — to protect their data. We won’t like it, but we’ll put up with it because at the end of the day we’d rather jump through all those hoops than give up all the convenience the cloud brings us.
I know summer doesn’t officially begin until next week, but free time is over already, the whistle is blowing, and everyone out of the pool. It’s time for the big boys to clean up. This morning, two big brand cloud services emerge from beta — one of them geared toward everyday applications, the other toward building custom sales-driven apps. And this means they’re no longer free…despite the name on one of them, which just happens to include the word “Free.” At $39 per month, you get up to 20 participants and unlimited conversions. Adobe has been billing its cloud service as a communications and collaboration platform, and no one knows yet whether businesses in general will accept it for that purpose in addition to its applications.
One of the earliest and most unexpected major players in cloud computing is Salesforce.com, whose development platform for cloud-driven sales applications using its proprietary database has earned it accolades even over IBM and Microsoft. This morning, the company has added a new pricing tier to its Force.com platform (notice the “sales” emphasis is also coming off a bit), giving small businesses a way to sample the service and get it distributed for something closer to what Microsoft’s currently charging for Windows Azure.
Low cost cloud computing infrastructure and managed services offering is powered in part by 3tera’s award winning AppLogic cloud computing platform and managed by Cirrhus9. The C9 CSP Platform enables Service Providers, like managed hosting companies, ASP firms, software companies and/or IT services companies, to offer Cloud solutions to their customers with minimal investment, short timelines and with reduced complexity. In addition, Cirrhus9 has configured a suite of Open Source products and management tools which provide low cost prepackaged solutions that include email, document sharing/management, collaboration, learning management and others.
AppLogic allows IT professionals to develop and deploy online applications in minutes instead of weeks, using only a browser to manage and scale on demand fully distributed systems and deliver security and business continuity for all applications, while fully controlling their cloud computing environment. Our mission is to help companies use and better understand Cloud technology to achieve measurable results,” continued Michalik. “As a Cloud Integrator, we are passionate about the success of our clients utilizing Cloud technology. For the Service Providers and Technology Companies the net result is that these features bring substantially greater efficiencies, shorter time to market and consistent high-quality infrastructure, with remarkably lower system associated costs.
Become a top scorer and Google will give you a “Year in the Cloud,” complete with Hewlett-Packard netbook and 1 terabyte of Google Account Storage for photos and mail. All will come in handy when you fly free for a year on Virgin America with complimentary WiFi. The hunt, “Day in the Cloud Challenge,” allows players to sign up and play on June 24, wherever they are on that day. “Simply sign up, arm yourself with a powerful array of Google Apps, and you can point and click your way towards glory — and an enticing prize pack.” Participants will need a Google Account to play. Those with a Gmail account might have a leg up because some of the questions involve knowledge of the mail app.
The game will last an hour, but Google has posted a practice game lasting about 10 minutes. Questions include “How many of these devices can be found on a typical Virgin America A320 aircraft?” or “This 5-letter word can mean a sequence of steps that demonstrate a valid conclusion or an action required for making bread. It’s also the name of an award winning play, which was then turned into a movie. What’s this word?”
It appears the campaign is Google’s way to push the concept of computing in the clouds to millions. Earlier this week, the Mountain View, Calif., company introduced Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experiment for data management in the clouds. It draws on the expertise of Googlers within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains.
