How to Overcome the Challenge of Scale and Automation in Cloud Computing

But those external clouds are growing by the minute and, who knows, your company may want a piece of those one day too. They are pretty cost-effective and getting increasingly sophisticated. They also turn the tables 180 degrees on you, the IT department: all that was your problem down the hall is now their problem in the ether. You’re the customer now and with that come a list of requests. At a minimum, you would like to:

1. Get what you pay for

As a customer of a cloud, you want to ensure that the service levels you've been promised are being delivered, leverage all the resources you've ordered, and make use of that VM for every minute it is running. When you pay by the hour, every hour counts. And if there is an outage or a problem, you want to be alerted and have a rapid resolution.

2. Track what's changed

Even though it isn't in your infrastructure, the workload is still your own. To aid in your side of troubleshooting, and to satisfy your audit processes, changes should continue to be tracked. This is harder than tracking your own local infrastructure, of course, and sophisticated tools must be used to automate change audit, providing both the cloud provider and the customers the level of visibility they need.

3. Protect your privacy

A public cloud, such as any public resource, is not built for you alone. But you still want a sense of privacy and isolation, ensuring that your system is not tainted by communicating with others in the cloud. Just because it isn't home, doesn’t mean it can ignore the house rules.

Prognosticators have gotten a bit starry-eyed about the cloud, envisioning a world in which multiple clouds are at your disposal—where your workloads run on the nearest, cheapest, fastest cloud and are easily motioned around the ether. This dream, beautiful in the soft lighting and morning mist of a good fairy tale, may be somewhere in our future. Nearer term, companies may build a relationship with a single cloud vendor. And today, that cloud lives down the hall, encased in the steel and silicon of your own data center.

To get to tomorrow, we'll conquer today's challenges of scale and automation, mastering the local before exploring the beyond. Because we know: if you try to push your problems onto the cloud, things will only get stormier.

 John Suit is principal founder and CTO of Fortisphere. John founded Fortisphere in 2006, and is responsible for developing the core technology behind the Fortisphere product suite. Prior to founding Fortisphere, John was the founder and CTO of SilentRunner, a successful company that was ultimately sold to Computer Associates.

John has held several leadership positions at both vice president and CTO levels, and he has invented and launched countless new products in the security space. John continues to advise the Department of Defense and Directorate of Central Intelligence in the areas of virtualization security and management, as well as information operations. He can be reached at john.suit@fortisphere.com.