Future of Cloud Computing & Security

Cloud computing has been a disruptive technological force in this emerging era of technology evolution. undoubtedly, cloud computing is going to be the only naturalized computing mechanism, every organization would be heavily leaning towards.   

Traditional (old) style leaders in many organizations still have a dual mind when it comes to adoption of cloud technologies. Largely because “Fear of losing control”, “Job Security” and sometimes because they have no awareness in cloud computing capabilities and the economic benefits that can be achieved through cloud technologies.

Cyber Security is a very critical component for enterprises and is always assumed that on premise is more secure than on the cloud. Again, this is because one believes in traditional security approaches that were built many years ago to guard the jewels. The security features provided in cloud environments are much more advanced than the traditional approaches; and most of the security capabilities are software defined and are easier to implement and manage “at a click of a button”.

Apart from technical capabilities, one other greatest benefit using cloud computing is, one can have the required infrastructure up and running in minutes. Whereas in self-managed datacenters (on premise) the same request could take couple of months based on the size of the organization and the infrastructure requirements.

My opinion, Cloud Computing definitely kills the bureaucracy in the enterprise world; making everyone’s life simpler, faster and allows us to focus on the actual problem instead of fighting through the channels to get the Infrastructure/environment up and running. 

“The kill chain for bureaucracy is what I would like to refer as Anti-bureaucratization”. 

In all openness, the biggest threat to innovation is “internal politics and organizational culture”. Most organizations are institutionalized and are very heavy on bureaucracy; to get a small task done, one must go through multiple layers of approvals which is the most pain taking and time consuming part of the job. And securing the resources per various compliances and getting it certified is the later part of it. I call this “bureaucracy” which, in turn is less productive and as well results in huge operational cost (both, CAPEX & OPEX).

A Basic Case study:   

Requirement: Let’s assume a finance team wants to build a web based application which will be used to connect and pull data from 10 different source systems, store all the data in a database and provide a rich web user interface for analyzing the monthly and quarterly expense reports.

Approvals: In a typical on premise deployment, the finance team requests the IT team to develop an application for them. The IT team in specific to infrastructure built out, spec’s out hardware based on the business requirements forwards it to the Infrastructure and procurement teams. 

The Process: Procurement team then requests, negotiates the price with the Hardware vendor company, Vendor ships in the hardware. Infrastructure team identifies the physical location (rack) where these servers can be hosted, reaches out to the network and caballing teams.

I think this should give you a bigger picture of the term “bureaucracy”. it’s a long activity and might continue for a minimum of 3 to 6 months for the right requirements to be in-place. Long story short; roughly 5 to 6 teams are involved just to setup the infrastructure; This absolutely delays the innovation in the fast-phased era.

This is one such reason that makes everyone lean towards cloud computing as it provides Velocity, Variety, and Volume (V3) to end users for setting up the required infrastructure in a matter of minutes; It doesn’t matter what type and how big the environment is.

Anti-bureaucratization makes everyone’s life much simpler, allows business to focus on targets, build high-performance, secure, scalable and more reliable infrastructure like never before.

Cloud Computing provides various type of deployments for consumers to consume cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) - "Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), continues to be the strongest-growing segment; more and more organizations are moving away from data center build-outs to prefer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and next to be Software as a Service (SaaS). The evolution of cloud technologies and services has taken a dramatic shift in the last two years. IaaS model has been dominating the cloud deployments; as we watched, we have seen the evolution of this model from Virtual Machines to Containers and then to Server-less Computing.

In my opinion, the next phase of IaaS evolution is Server-less computing; things will get much easier and one has to just upload the code and probably estimate the present and the potential future usage of the application; behind the scenes the cloud providers would use various algorithms to decide and create the best intended platform to run your code on. This by itself eliminates the burden on you for creating network designs, load balancing, zoning the workloads, DNS routing, and many other things.

Software as a Service is going to be the norm of cloud computing in the very near future. As technologies evolve and organizations transform to digitalization more and more services will be adopted as Software as a Service.

Internet of Things (IoT); (“connected devices”) will transform cloud computing to the next level. According to forbes.com “IoT market will grow and will have approximately 75.4 billion connected devices by 2025”; Imagine when all these devices are connected to the cloud? we are going to see at least 1000x increase in the internet traffic and 1000x increase in data storage in cloud environments. When Amazon AWS introduced “Snow Mobile” to transfer Exabyte’s of data I was little skeptical; why would someone need this. But, as I started connecting the dots to get the “Big Picture” on evolution of technological capabilities and future where the businesses are leaning towards there is no doubt why we need a storage capability like “Snow Mobile”.

The future: Cloud, Mobile, Connected Devices & Data; obviously, the transporter Internet 

Great!! The Next big question is Security

What do we Secure? Where do we Secure? How do we Secure? (Watch out for my next article focused on security - what, where and how)

As technology evolves, Cyber Threat landscape and actors have changed dramatically in recent years; Network perimeter security is no longer a “holy grail”. It is no longer keeping away adversaries from our network.

Adopt the new emerging Security Paradigm in cloud environments: Position ourselves to build intelligent security and implement Security as a Code to Identify, to Detect, to Protect, to Prevent and to Recover from any abnormal security events.

Build systems that are “Secure by Default”.

Security is not just technology; it must be linked to people & processes as well.

Cyber Security must never be an afterthought. We need to plan, design and build security when an idea is born.

Conclusion

Cloud Computing is the emerging era of technological platform that provides tremendous capabilities to businesses to focus on the intended targets, allowing them to accelerate their products to market with much economic freedom. Cloud is the future and is surely giving a tough competition to our traditional data centers.