Trusting the Almighty Cloud! No, this topic is not about religon, actually it may be --sort of a trip in faith!

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Hey followers, I have been off the radar for a while. Happy to say I am back. I've been under a lot of deadlines at work --gotta love SOA applications! Well I won't be talking about SOA, I will be talking its brother, cloud computing. I was reading an article about a trip into the secret, online cloud.

A guy from San Jose, CA wanted to know what this magical cloud was. So he started asking some questions and eventually toured an IBM datacenter. He was amazed, yet came away with some valid questions and concerns. What happens to the data? What if IBM closed its doors? Is it secure? What if a datacenter goes offline? I guess good faith in a cloud provider is needed....

He brought up some interesting points. As I work in the Government, there has been talk of using the cloud. Actually we would have to build our own cloud and have government entities give up their data and applications in order to drop them into the cloud. Maybe build a GSA cloud and put things like HR, benefits, payroll, and etc into a GSA backed cloud. Now the other federal departments are going to ask the same questions: What happens to my data if contracts change and we go to another datacenter? How long do you keep historical data? Who has access to that data? Is the GSA cloud secure? What if lightning strikes the building? Lots of questions and the "trust me" answer may not get a lot of air play!

What I'd like to see besides a datacenter tour, is the business model. In addition, I'd like to see the service level agreements, security plans, security measures, uptime statics, data management, and etc.

Granted the blinking lights are cool, I just need to see the guy behind the curtain!

P.S. check out the article in the hyper link above.

Comments

IronHorse said…
Seek and you shall find. Here's a nice look at the fun involved in cloud SLAs. I know of at least one large company that was told they had X number of days to get their data somewhere else because the cloud provider was going under and when the lights are turned off, so is access to their data.
http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/The-Clouds-Emerging-SLA-Ecosystem-66435.html?wlc=1257442648
November 5, 2009 at 12:40 PM
Jerry Rhoads said…
Thanks for the article Horse!
November 5, 2009 at 2:32 PM
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