Is the Cloud secure?

29

September

2016

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A common response that I get when I promote Cloud Computing to enterprises is “Cloud Computing sounds great but is it really safe? I don’t trust Cloud providers for keeping my data safe”. I can understand that the idea of letting go of private and important data into the hands of a distant company can be heart-breaking. It feels like you are leaving your data open to the world with a big fat 0.0.0.0/0 on your firewall, but let me explain how this is actually counter-intuitive.

In most cases, and especially for young startups, running your servers and keeping your databases in big Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure or Google Compute Engine is much safer than keeping it on-Premise.

Let me illustrate this.

Let’s imagine someone actually tries to hack into your servers. Where do you really think that your data is going to be safer? In your enterprise basement where your infrastructure was set up by your own internal team of IT engineers? Or within the infrastructure of a multinational company that is specialised in IT infrastructure, and whose business would be crushed if it was found that its infrastructure was not secure?

I mean, by hosting your servers on the Amazon Web Services Cloud for example, you would be sharing the same infrastructure as the NASA and the US government. If they thought their data would not be safe in the cloud, do you really think they would be hosting their servers there? Cloud providers have teams of specialised IT engineers working everyday to make sure their infrastructures are the safest on the market. Security is actually one of the core values that Cloud providers offer.

Now it might be the idea of “sharing your servers” that scares you. To get a little bit more technical, let’s just say that firewalls are placed at the hypervisor level, so even though you might be sharing the same machine as someone else, it would not make any difference if your servers were located on 2 different continents. And to that I can only repeat the same arguments that I have mentioned above. A business specialised in infrastructure security, and hosting hundreds of multinational companies, is going to offer you a safer environment than your local IT engineers.

The idea of the Cloud being insecure only comes from fear of the unknown.

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Another victim of the Amazon serial killer

24

September

2016

No ratings yet.

Back in the old days, businesses would all keep their IT infrastructure “on premise” (in the building where they operate) and would manage it internally. Seems like the most natural thing in the world, but you will soon understand how inconvenient this actually is

Buying computing power is a long-term and expensive investment, that takes a long time to change or to replace, so you want to do it right. But doing it right is actually not as easy as it may sound: it is usually very hard to predict how much computing power your company needs, and even harder to predict what it will need in a year or so. This is especially a problem for startups who have no clue where their enterprise will be in the next few years.

Let me illustrate this. Just picture yourself in the skin of a young aspiring entrepreneur about to launch a new super-funky online business. Now of course, you have no idea how your e-business is actually going to take off, and how much traffic you will generate in the next few months, or years, and at which rate. So your best strategy is (I hope) to invest in A LOT of computing power to make sure your servers never crash. And just like most entreprises, you end up hosting your initially small e-business of three and a half daily customers on over-the-top, NASA-style web servers, and pay for way more than you actually need.

Does not sound like the most convenient thing in the world, does it? Well, it did not take very long for Amazon to target the IT infrastructure industry as its next victim.

In 2006, Amazon completely revolutionized the IT infrastructure industry by inventing what is commonly known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or Cloud Computing. The concept consists of offering online access to distant servers via their web platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS allows businesses to rent computing power for as long and they need, and only charges them “only for what they use”. This means that enterprises could rent a server via the AWS platform for a day, and would only be charged for that day. No more long-term investment is necessary.

This is revolutionary in many different ways.

Firstly, no more need to guess what computing power you will need. You can scale your infrastructure up and down anytime, and have your computing power updated within minutes. Your website is suddenly making a buzz and experiences an unexpected amount of visits? Within minutes, your IT infrastructure can be scaled up to handle the extra traffic.

Secondly, IaaS allows flexibility. Companies can now test different IT infrastructures, different servers, different databases, etc. Since they are only charged by the hour, they can cancel their rent and have their infrastructure updated in no time, anytime they want.

Thirdly, and most importantly, it has made computing power easily accessible to everyone. IT is no more a constraint for startups and young entreprises. Within minutes, I can have the servers necessary to launch a new website and scale up as demand increases. Everyone is playing in the court, Startups and Multinationals. Everyone now has access to nearly unlimited IT resources. If I want, from my laptop in my student apartment, I can have access the same computing power as Facebook or the NASA. This was not imaginable 15 years ago.

And the list of advantages of IaaS goes on and on: reliability, fault tolerance, security, ease of use, and cost efficiency.

To this day, I do not see any disadvantage that Cloud Computing has brought to the IT infrastructure industry. Can you?

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