The biggest problem with cloud is security: VMware
- 21 June, 2011 14:54
- Comments 1
The biggest problem with the cloud is security, according to VMware senior manager of products and solutions in Asia-Pacific and Japan, Michael Warrilow.
He made his comments during the Datacenter Dynamics conference in Sydney. The aim of the session was to address the promise, potential and pitfalls of cloud computing.
According to Warrilow, hybrid cloud computing is the best form of delivering workloads as it suits both the public and private cloud.
“Low governance requirements suit the public cloud while other requirements almost always stay in a private cloud setting. It’s about the right combination of both which is the only solution that works long term,” he said.
Warrilow also added that Australia is a great indicator of how the cloud could establish itself within enterprises because virtualisation proportions are greater locally than in any other country in the world.
“We are now working on how to get the right kind of bandwidth to allow technologies to enable spiking of workloads that could potentially follow on in a global environment throughout the day,” he stated.
With a variety of technologies surfacing and the need for access to applications of the underlying data on almost any device, the requirements to support it back into the datacentre are being pushed.
As a result, Warrilow warns that security is the concern for most users who embrace the cloud as it has to be done securely in an overall integrated fashion.
“If you can define your security and attach it to the workload, then when the workload moves around, the security moves with it,” he said.
The advantages are that it moves workloads from business premises securely into the cloud and operates within a secure datacentre.
In the next five to 10 years, Warrilow suggested removing traditional physical security mechanisms to support and comply with requirements.
He said it was unnecessary to have a physical datacentre in order to secure mission critical workloads and applications for businesses.
“If there is a world where your datacentres are no longer physical and potentially, running in the cloud, where are you going to put those physical security devices and how are they going to enable you to run your business in a secure fashion and maintain the business?” Warrilow said.
He named four key advantages to cloud computing:
- ‘Virtualising virtualisation’ that allows self-service and directory services to authorise people to spin up their own workloads and provision them either into production or test environments
- Multi-tenancy enabling collaboration of segments for use in governments or institutions
- Greater levels of service as businesses can start offering differentiated levels of service of the same piece of infrastructure
- Offering pay-as-you-go as when all infrastructures are well met and instrumented, companies are able to put cost policies in.
Warrilow also addressed the disadvantages of it which include:
- Approaching physical operators to inform them of not requiring their services.
- Not engaging in the buy in would result in not being able to doing the design and measuring the value – making it harder to continue with cloud computing.
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Comments
Baysnet
1
Glad to hear VMware finally agreeing with what we have been saying for some time now. Our virtualisation security practice is booming and for too long VMware have seen us as the Dr No's preventing their P2V growth when all along we have been trying to build security, compliance and auditability on and around P2V projects. The additional cost does impact on the ROI and some of our good friends at VMware didn't want to hear about that if it didn't help the sale.