Cloud computing: Are you ready for the Golden age?

A start-up enterprise, created in 2006 to help more than 200 customers manage purchases and purchases, Coupa has no IT infrastructure. It runs its business entirely in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Sankey Nike (Sanket Naik), head of Coupa Cloud strategy, is not worried about putting everything in Amazon Web services and putting backup capacity in other clouds like Rackspace. "I know there are a lot of problems around the cloud, especially about security," he said. But I think some people resist this change if they haven't applied the cloud yet. Nike said he was comfortable putting the whole business in the cloud. This is the approach that the company has been using.

But not everyone in the Coupa company is as willing to go into the cloud as Nike. According to consultants and industry experts, large business customers have yet to use the public multi-tenant cloud extensively for mission-critical applications.

Andi Mann, vice president of the CA technology company responsible for strategic solutions, says large enterprises continue to support private cloud Andy Mann. It organizations are increasingly understanding the risks, opportunities, and potential benefits of public and private cloud computing. They are basically betting their chips on private cloud cards. Mann argues that public cloud makers are not suited to the needs of large enterprises for security, interoperability and reliability. As a result, large companies are unwilling to adopt a public cloud for larger, more sensitive applications.

According to Thomas Bittman, a cloud analyst at Gartner, a market research firm, about half of the big business customers he works with are using a public cloud for development and testing, and the other half using a public cloud for a variety of applications Thomas Bitmann. However, few large businesses rely on the public cloud infrastructure to run mission-critical applications.

Many of the findings support this view: according to research and consultancy Wisegate, in a recent survey, more than half of executives surveyed said they would not migrate the data to be protected into the public cloud because it was too risky. Another One-fourth said they planned to investigate the need for a public cloud for critical applications. But they haven't made any changes so far. When asked about the reasons for their withdrawal, 73% per cent said security was the main reason they did not migrate the company's critical applications to cloud-based applications.

Some cloud service providers think their technology is getting worse.

Rightscale co-founder and CEO Michael Krandol (Michael Crandell) has a simple response to the question of whether the cloud can be used for important task applications: "Absolutely." Rightscale is a cloud management platform that sits between cloud users and providers.

In fact, all of our customers are running production operations in the cloud, Crandall said. Coupa is an example. Security, he admits, remains a major concern for the cloud. However, the public cloud has shown that it is equally safe, if not more secure than a private cloud.

In fact, some cloud providers are addressing concerns about security and making security a differentiating factor in their products. Firehost is a multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure service that adheres to the 2.0 standard of the payment card industry and has more than 1000 users. ' Security is our life, ' says Chris Drake, the company's CEO, Chris Dreck.

Drake added that the key to cloud security is to assume that everything is unsafe. Firehost encrypts user data and provides the user with a key. This means that no one can access this information except the user. Firehost collects internal information that it blocks for each user's threats and uses that information to protect the entire infrastructure. Firehost recently said it blocked 19 million cyber attacks against its customers in the second quarter of this year.

However, other cloud providers say security is a shared responsibility between service providers and customers. John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, said the provider was able to install advanced security features to keep its infrastructure in line with government and industry regulations. John Angues However, it is the responsibility of the customer to ensure that the data they send to the cloud and the access point that accesses the data are secure at the user's side.

Angus believes that regulators need an educational process to verify the security features of providers. Regulators verify that security features will ease the customer's concerns.

Olvensiquera Allwyn Sequeira, chief technology officer and vice president of Cloud network at VMware, said some big business customers would never be reassured by putting the most important tasks in the cloud. This creates the need for a hybrid cloud. Businesses are willing to use a public cloud for a variety of applications, and use private clouds for applications they don't trust in the public cloud. Having the ability to connect the two clouds together creates a hybrid cloud environment. He thought that the hybrid cloud was the future of the cloud. CIOs need the cloud, but they have to maintain control.

David Goodman, head of cloud solutions at Unisys, said the reason for the retreat of big companies might not be security, perhaps infrastructure. If you look carefully at many providers, they have good security. The problem is that while the cloud can provide flexibility and potentially cost-saving benefits, it does not have a compelling reason to migrate existing applications to the public cloud.

The big companies have invested a lot of money in the existing infrastructure, Goodman said. They accept the cloud and are interested. However, compared with SMEs, they will take different steps to apply the public cloud.

The startups that are building their own IT infrastructure from scratch are putting everything in the clouds, says Goodman. But many of the big companies he works with already have the infrastructure to handle the company's it needs. When businesses have new and expanded it requirements, they are willing to use a public cloud.

As the company's it needs continue to exceed its own resources, Goodman predicts that large companies will turn to the cloud and even be willing to put sensitive applications in the public cloud. But it will take time and markets to mature.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)