My View on CloudConnect 2012

cloud-connectLast week I attended one of the most popular cloud technology conferences in the world – CloudConnect. The CloudConnect conference started about four years ago. Attending the event gave me a clear understanding of the market maturity and evolution rhythm. Check out the following sections for the main points on what I heard and learned:

Cloud Performance

The underlying infrastructure performance, round trip time, bandwidth, caching and rendering are to be counted as the major features of an online service performance. In an interesting presentation by @joeweinman (known by his famous “Cloudonomics” theory), it was claimed that latency holds the greatest weight among these faetures. I encourage you to check out his new research – As Time Goes By: The Law of Cloud Response Time presents some good formulas, methods and considerations with regards to online services’ performance and latency (including simple facts, for example, that people tend to prefer selecting from fewer options on an online page –  so you can have less content on a page and achieve a better browsing performance).

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The Cloud Security Part 2: Market Perceptions, Vendors and More

This year, April study conducted by independent research firm Ponemon Institute and sponsored by CA Technologies, surveyed 103 cloud service providers in the U.S. and 24 in Europe representing a mix of cloud service and deployment models. 70% said they allocate 10% or less of IT resources to security and control-related activity.

Who is most responsible for ensuring the security of the cloud resources ?


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The Cloud Security Part 1: For Dummies

cloud security considerationsFrom an attacker’s perspective, cloud providers aggregate access to many victims’ data into a single point of entry. As the cloud environments become more and more popular, they will increasingly become the focus of attacks. Some organizations think that liability can be outsourced, but no, and I hope that we all understand it cannot. The contract with your cloud vendors basically means nothing, the ISVs or should I say the `SaaS providers`  still holds the responsibility, so rather than focusing on contracts and limiting liability in cloud services deals, you should focus on controls and auditability.

“Dropbox, … deceived users about the security ..The FTC complaint charges Dropbox with telling users that their files were totally encrypted” Wired Magazine

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IEEE and DMTF Define Cloud and SaaS Standards

Continue from my last post about NIST, I found the IEEE targets Cloud Interoperability Standards and for that matter the organization established 2 work groups
P2301 – Guide for Cloud Portability and Interoperability Profiles (CPIP): ”This guide advises cloud computing ecosystem participants (cloud vendors, service providers, and users) of standards-based choices in areas such as application interfaces, portability interfaces, management interfaces, interoperability interfaces, file formats, and operation conventions. This guide groups these choices into multiple logical profiles, which are organized toaddress different cloud personalities.”
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