Cloud Computing, страница 2

2. Regulatory compliance. Customers are ultimately responsible for the security and integrity of their own data, even when it is held by a service provider. Traditional service providers are subjected to external audits and security certifications. Cloud computing providers who refuse to undergo this scrutiny are "signaling that customers can only use them for the most trivial functions," according to Gartner.

3. Data location. When you use the cloud, you probably won't know exactly where your data is hosted. In fact, you might not even know what country it will be stored in. Ask providers if they will commit to storing and processing data in specific jurisdictions, and whether they will make a contractual commitment to obey local privacy requirements on behalf of their customers, Gartner advises.

4. Data segregation. Data in the cloud is typically in a shared environment alongside data from other customers. Encryption is effective but isn't a cure-all. "Find out what is done to segregate data at rest," Gartner advises. The cloud provider should provide evidence that encryption schemes were designed and tested by experienced specialists. "Encryption accidents can make data totally unusable, and even normal encryption can complicate availability," Gartner says.

5. Recovery. Even if you don't know where your data is, a cloud provider should tell you what will happen to your data and service in case of a disaster. "Any offering that does not replicate the data and application infrastructure across multiple sites is vulnerable to a total failure," Gartner says. Ask your provider if it has "the ability to do a complete restoration, and how long it will take."

6. Investigative support. Investigating inappropriate or illegal activity may be impossible in cloud computing, Gartner warns. "Cloud services are especially difficult to investigate, because logging and data for multiple customers may be co-located and may also be spread across an ever-changing set of hosts and data centers. If you cannot get a contractual commitment to support specific forms of investigation, along with evidence that the vendor has already successfully supported such activities, then your only safe assumption is that investigation and discovery requests will be impossible."

7. Long-term viability. Ideally, your cloud computing provider will never go broke or get acquired and swallowed up by a larger company. But you must be sure your data will remain available even after such an event. "Ask potential providers how you would get your data back and if it would be in a format that you could import into a replacement application," Gartner says.⁽⁵⁾⁽⁶⁾

1. Real CC – companies

Actually, almost everyone used Cloud Computing services – the simplest example is e-mail. All the web-sites where you can send messages are cloud. Only Outlook isn’t, because it’s program that has to be installed on your computer and without it you can’t send any messages. But there many more new high-level services:

• Google Inc: Google Docs и Google App Engine, Google Storage

Google Storage Service is designed to store data and on its basis interesting platforms are available: Google Prediction API and Google BigQuery, designed to work with large data sets and their linguistic analysis. Google Storage is available for companies only from the U.S.
In November 2010, Google released a beta version of Cloud Connect - plug-in for Microsoft Office, enabling to collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the Microsoft Office desktop and cloud service Google Docs. Poaching users of Microsoft Office has a systematic character. In March 2010, Google released a free tool Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange, the name of which fully reflects the essence. The tool is designed to transit from Exchange to Google cloud services with transfer of all corporate emails, calendar and contacts.

• Dropbox

It’s service that allows user to share his own files in Internet. It differs from others with it’s interface: it’s shown as ordinary folder in you computer but all the information in it is available from any place in the world.

• Oracle Corporation

• VMware, Inc.

• Salesforce.com

• IBM

• Cisco

• Amazon.com⁽⁴⁾

1. Problems in Russia

Actually there are so many problems in Russia that to reach the greatest range of problems each issue will be presented briefly.

• The main obstacle to implementing "cloud” is the lack of broadband access (BBA) - especially in the regions. Good for the SaaS channel has a reasonable cost only in Moscow, St. Petersburg and several big cities. Partly the government is solving this problem. The widespread introduction of broadband has become one of 38 projects of approved by Presidential Commission of Modernization and Technological Development in Russia.

• Alex Alexin, representative of the Association of Strategic Outsourcing (ASTRA) sees problem of spread of cloud technologies in the unsettled legal framework, although the benefits of cloud computing for government agencies are obvious. 

• Anton Marchenko (head of marketing project Softline Cloud Services) believes that the biggest obstacle to the development of cloud services is now a general lack of awareness of consumers - both companies and individuals - the very possibility of their use. In his view, the market itself is bad. Also potentially dangerous factor for the development of this segment Marchenko called the Russian legislation. "At the moment there is no normal regulation of this particular segment, and the law on personal data (FL 152), compliance with which must be achieved before the end of this year, puts enormous constraints on the service provider, which is not conducive to business development.”

• Difficulties with payment and problems of integration with domestic products, e.g. 1C.

• Poorly developed structure of data centers.⁽⁴⁾

1. Microsoft IT Case Cup

Microsoft as a big company sees great perspectives in cloud computing, so it makes a lot of researches in this area, so it started Microsoft IT Case Cup, where I and my team, we are taking part in. We’ve got a file with information about all what I told and more and more other, in general about Microsoft. And we are to create strategy of development of this technology in Russia. On exam I’m going to speak about what we devised and what we achieved.

1. Conclusion

It’s obviously that Cloud Computing is such a thing that opens up new spaces in business, and not only there. Any user on its old PC with Internet can do amazing things. I know that a british group of students discovered some new stars using this technology: they got public photos made by one agency and asked all the user on the planet to give them a bit of their processing power. It’s just hard to notice such a thing on computer but how it helped them!

1. References

1) http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/

2) http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/06/10/235429/A-history-of-cloud-computing.htm

3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Technical_description

4) Microsoft IT Case

5) http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/gartner-seven-cloud-computing-security-risks-853

6) http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/gartner-seven-cloud-computing-security-risks-853

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