Shadow it: Hidden Enterprise Cloud Computing

Many years ago it was still reasonable to say that cloud computing was a hot air that would soon be forgotten. But it's getting harder to say that now.

The cost of public cloud services did not fall. Gartner predicts that the public cloud market will swell from $109 billion trillion to $207 billion by 2016. The company also predicts that by 2017, the chief market officer will spend more on it than the CIO. At the top of the popular public cloud services list are typical software-service (SaaS) applications, such as Salesforce.com customer Relationship Management (CRM) and workday payroll services.

A lot of it is happening behind it: Sometimes it's called "Shadow it," says Ellen Rubin, vice president of Terremark Cloud, a company that is affiliated with Verizon to provide management hosting and cloud services.

"I attended some meetings, and there was some strange discussion between it and the IT staff related to the business, and the business owners tried to hide the fact that they had done the cloud," Rubin said.

The problem is that when business owners and it come together, they often forget to ask a difficult question, and the experienced IT expert will ask the cloud provider: What are your uptime statistics? How do I achieve redundancy? What if security is ensured? What is your service level agreement? Would it be cheaper to put this workload on the cloud for a long time?

Forgetting to ask these questions in advance could lead to some good public cloud failures, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, which shifted some of its business-recommended Gmail deployments due to security concerns, or web-based services that failed due to cloud provider downtime.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is currently the top developer of cloud developers in June, has been down due to a power outage in one of its data centers, and a bug in its flex-load balancing service has led some customers down to 6 hours. Some AWS customers barely finish their work during downtime.

"I think we've found an application area that should be better handled, but we didn't," Jim O ' Neill said, the CIO of HubSpot, a hosting market software provider.

"It's so easy for me to ship to Amazon," but in fact our application should be able to build better.

It is entrusted to the cloud, and perhaps shadow it is not hidden as its name. A recent security survey by Ponemon Cato suggests that corporate it understands that the public cloud has infiltrated the enterprise, but is not optimistic at all.

More than half of the more than 4,000 respondents to the Ponemon survey said they had shifted sensitive or confidential data to external cloud services, while another one-third would be implemented in the next two years.

But a little digging, the picture is blurred. These companies, which have put sensitive data on the cloud, 39% say it reduces their security. 63% means you don't fully understand what the cloud provider is doing to ensure data security; an alarming 35% of respondents said they would deliver their cryptographic keys to the cloud provider.

"There are more data moving to the cloud than I expected, and I'm surprised that the lack of confidence has shifted to the cloud," said Richard Moulds, a sponsor of the survey, Thales E-security's strategy vice president. "I think the only reason people do this is because of the economic benefits," he said. "Moulds said.

(Responsible editor: Schpeppen)