Safe within the clouds
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Two big names in the information business - Amazon and Autonomy - have recently launched cloud computing products, further reinforcing the view that cloud computing is rapidly becoming both mainstream and commoditised. But amid a growing number of available solutions, how do you know which is the right one for you - and is it secure?

Launched last month, Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offers a 'secure and seamless bridge' between a company's existing IT infrastructure and the Amazon Web Services cloud. It means that a company can apply all its existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls and intrusion detection systems to resources held in the cloud - and, this being Amazon, it's effectively pay-as-you-go, with no long-term contracts, minimum spend or up-front investment required (http://digbig.com/5bagfn).

Autonomy's product, also announced in August, is aimed at law firms looking for a secure archive for their documents. Its iManage Digital Safe solution enables firms to archive and retrieve items including email, audio and images as well as conventional documents - and, reflecting the company's expertise in the eDiscovery field, it's powered by Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), which ingests, de-duplicates and indexes the documents, ready for immediate recovery (http://digbig.com/5bagfp).

Autonomy's Digital Safe can also be installed on a client's own premises but, according to a recent report from Forrester Research, cloud computing gains added attraction in an economic downturn as a means of saving on in-house computing and headcount costs.

However, as its report How Secure Is Your Cloud? points out, security becomes an even bigger issue when you entrust your data to somebody else; IT professionals need to develop better ways of evaluating the security and privacy practices of the cloud services they use (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bagfq). And there's another issue. In a situation where Amazon or any other well known brand with masses of spare computer capacity can generate revenue for itself by offering some of it to customers, there's likely to be a proliferation of suppliers; potential customers are going to need advice not only on where to go, but also on what will work with what.

Enter, according to the analyst Gartner, a new kind of middle man: the cloud service broker. Broker technology will need to be able to mediate between different cloud-based services to ensure they work together properly, to combine multiple services into one or more new services, and to pick the best available service for use at any given time (http://digbig.com/5bagfr). As Udo Hohlfeld said in a recent LiveWire posting (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22459), more and more providers want us to be on their cloud. The trick will be to land safely on the right one.

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