A real gap has appeared between how Cloud vendors and their customers perceive security. In a recent survey, that 69% of vendors believe security is primarily a cloud customer responsibility, but only 35 percent of them believe security is their responsibility only. Just 16 percent of cloud providers feel security is a shared responsibility, compared to 33 percent of cloud users.
Although security has repeatedly been highlighted as one of the key concerns with Cloud Computing, only 20 percent of cloud vendors see security as a competitive advantage, and fewer than 27 percent feel their cloud services can protect and secure customer information.
InfoWorld published a story last week titled the Top 10 worst cloud outages. The article certainly makes for good reading, although it would be nice, if people would stop acting so surprised about cloud failures. It is after all just software and server hardware, and, while very clever, all technology fail at some point despite the recent hype. In fact, the more you have, the more likely it is to experience failures. A Cloud vendor would actually need to work harder to just match a ‘simpler’, traditional data centre in terms of high availability.
The Butterfly Effect
The most important lesson taught at a first aid course is to ‘stop the accident’ – the same is starting to apply to highly interconnected software systems.
The recent Gmail failure caused by a software bug discovered during the deployment process, yet it still managed to affect 0.02 percentage of Gmail users. Skype has experienced two outages due to a combination of localised high load and a (replicated) software bug (discussed here and here). Amazon’s recent failure was a network misconfiguration which escalated into a data replication storm.
High availability built through infrastructure replication typically still share the same software infrastructure, e.g., multiple deployments, same code, so a bug in one equals a bug in all. The space shuttle had two separate flight systems to avoid this and achieve high reliability – not the same as high availability – which in a cloud computing context equals the ability to use two (or more) alternative cloud vendors for the same service.
To celebrate the turn of a decade, IEEE Spectrum Magazine has compiled the list of top 11 technologies of the previous decade. Apart from being an interesting read, the newsworthy part is the fact that technology 1 (Smartphones), 2 (Social Networking), 3 (Voice over IP) 4 (LED), 6 (Cloud Computing), 10 (digital photography), and 11 (Class D audio) are all closely related. Continue reading “Top 11 technologies of the decade”
