In comparison to security and reliability, the third major concern around enterprise cloud computing has received almost no attention so far. That concern is speed, or rather the lack of it in the cloud. As mentioned in this Sys-Con Media report, the Amazon team have built an architecture that is very low cost and ideally suited to supporting web companies where the transactions involved are mainly serving up data rather than performing complex analysis. But major enterprises are different.
“Today’s cloud users are overwhelmingly web companies, for whom the low cost of cloud computing, together with simple elastic scaling are the critical factors. But major enterprises are different. In looking at the cloud option, their first major concern is security. This is well documented, has been discussed to death in cloud blogs and conferences, and is certainly a real problem. However, I think we can be very confident that the cloud vendors will be able to quickly overcome the concerns in this area. The reality, although not currently the perception, is that many/most in-house systems are no more secure than cloud systems. The perception of cloud security will change quickly over the next couple of years, as more cloud services are deployed. There are certainly no significant technical impediments here. Many of the security technologies used to protect in-house datacenters can be adapted to secure cloud services.”
