Back From Prague…

By Guy Bunker | May 22, 2009 | 2 Comments 

Guy Bunker

I was at the Cloud Computing Conference in Prague earlier this week and there were a lot of great sessions – along with some very interesting new perspectives. Stephen Foskett has done a great report and rather than repeat that, here are my main discussion points.

1) Is the lack of ‘true’ European cloud providers preventing adoption of the cloud in Europe? It’s an interesting question and one I had never thought about. Having worked for American companies for nearly two decades, I have never been concerned by the control they may have. It is true that various EU countries have very strict privacy laws and so they may be restricted from using global public clouds – but for the rest… this is something that needs to be looked at further. The cloud is going to offer competitive advantage to those that use it effectively – the EU mustn’t be left behind.

2) Cloud capacity. Cloud service providers often tout ‘infinite’ capacity – but in reality they do have physical machines (virtualized up to the hilt) which have limitations. When looking to deploy to a cloud, the customer should be able to see what the capacity of the service provider is, what it is currently running at and what the peak demand was. For customers requiring a single instance it is slightly different from those who want elastic demand and who may be caught short. After all, when it’s gone, it’s gone – and adding more capacity to a data centre, cloudy or not, will take time…

3) Computational integrity. This came up at the FORWARDmeeting as well – in essence how do you know that the calculations going on in the cloud are correct. What would happen if someone interfered with the data or the calculation – would you be able to spot it. As a simple example, what if someone changed one digit in every telephone number in your CRM data, or map data was shifted by half a kilometre? This is a theoretical problem at this point, but it is a potential weakness that needs to be addressed. Encrypting data and hashing it means you can check on the data integrity – the data is how you left it, but how about the calculations? Curiously, I discussed this in the Data Leaks book – and one approach is to use well known data / transactions for which the outcome is known and then to periodically throw this at the service and check the result is what was expected. If not… well, there’s another piece of your disaster recovery / business continuity strategy you need to cover.

Here is a picture of the expert panel, including your’s truly, Guy Bunker. For more pictures take a look here.

gb-prague2

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2 Responses to “Back From Prague…”

  1. Back From The Pile: Interesting Links From Mid-May – Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat on June 13th, 2009

    [...] in Prague last week at the Sys-Con Cloud Expo. While there, I met up with a few others, including Guy Bunker, Sam Johnston, Roman Stanek, and others. See Time for a debrief!, Review of the Reviews, and [...]

  2. Finbarr McCarthy on June 16th, 2009

    The point about infinite capacity is interesting, recently I was provisioning a handfull of small instances on Amazon AWS EU West 1A only to find that it was unable to provide the capacity. I was able to provision the capacity on EU West 1B but it does make you question the available resources.

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