Just read an interesting explanation for cloud computing, in particular Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). Apparently, storage is accessed in the Amazon's cloud using web service, which is part of the S3 API.
Amazon also offers another service called the Elastic Block Store (EBS). In short, it's like a mounted drive. Subscribe to it, and treat it as a mounted drive in the Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, which is like a virtual machine.
With regards to cloud computing, I do agree that storage can be a valid business model for the cloud. Reason is quite simple. If a customer subscribes for 1 TB of data, do they use all of it at one shot? Not very likely. A business model can be built on this concept.
However, the tricky part is what data could you put in the cloud? I will not feel safe if my enterprise customers' data are all in the cloud. However, putting my customer information (non-sensitive) from a e-Store for example would still be alright.
I guess I'm still "traditional" in the sense. I still think that the public cloud is best suited for websites, forums, collaboration wikis/blogs, online storage, etc. Along the lines of non-sensitive information.
I'm still pondering the problem on how to manage a private cloud, and justify the economies of scale and the cost of maintaining it, while still bringing in cost savings. If anyone cracks it, cloud computing will be adopted quite quickly by businesses.
2 comments:
The problem with such an architecture currently is the bottleneck due to network speed. Try "writing" and "reading" a 700MB DivX file from a Web mounted drive (like Apple's iDisk). Takes an eternity...
This usability issue is bigger than security, as one can always encrypt sensitive data files.
The problem with network speed is that it cannot be controlled from the customer/user aspect. It depends on your ISP, lease line, etc. This is something that I'm not going to waste any brain juice on because it's out of my control. :) The cloud is not meant for large amount of data, and I've recently seen people writing about problems transferring large files to the cloud.
My point about security is the access people have to your files/data in the cloud.
The more savvy ones will encrypt their confidential information but most will not. What happens if you loose your passcode? Many have stopped using such encryption because of this. In the enterprise level, how will a rank and file staff knows what information is to be encrypted and what is not?
The trend will be security from the transport layer to the application layer. In summary... Secure transfer and storage of files/data. That would bring widespread adoption of the cloud.
Like you say... It's the usability issue. Do I need to remember to encrypt my files every time I upload something to the cloud? :)
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