The things you should never put in the cloud
Since the birth of cloud computing, there has been a reluctance to move certain critical systems over to a cloud service provider (CSP). Have we advanced enough as an industry to dispel these fears, or will there always be certain areas of business best kept in-house?
Traditionally, security has always been the main prohibiter of cloud adoption. We've reached a point where, if you work with the right providers, your data can be as secure in a cloud environment as it would be on premise – safer, in some cases. Now it's more common for us to hear concerns around performance instead of security. Multi-tenant public cloud environments are notoriously difficult to control in terms of performance and stability; the level of service you end up receiving can be dependent on the usage of the other organisations on the same platform – an issue known as the Noisy Neighbour effect.
Now we have technologies available from companies like SolidFire that allow each organisation in a public cloud to have a provisioned set of IOPS, meaning their neighbours' usage has no knock-on effect on their performance.
Of course there is certain information that will never be stored using a cloud service provider. We wouldn't want highly secure MOD data held in public clouds. Organisations with IL 5 or 6 level data, for example, rightly have very strict rules over the use of third party providers. Security breaches for information at that level could cause damage on a global scale.
There are also certain systems that wouldn't benefit from migration to a CSP. Image and video manipulation requires a lot of local processing so will surely be the last thing to move to an offsite service provider. Despite the rebranding of Adobe's design software to "Creative Cloud" – designers are still using Photoshop locally – even if they are paying for the software on a monthly recurring basis like a cloud service.
It isn't difficult to see a time when even these applications could be delivered remotely. AWS recently launched Amazon AppStream which allows developers to host and stream games remotely - and remove the need to develop for the different devices.
These days, a big part of what we do as a service provider is dispel the myths that surround cloud services. Until now, cloud computing has been seen as a relatively new and immature technology, with its risks being communicated much more prolifically than its benefits. Of course there will always remain risks, and the decision to put your systems into a cloud environment isn't (and shouldn't ever be) one to be taken lightly. Data is an organisation's most valuable asset and taking the time to evaluate which of your systems would be most effective, in terms of time, cost and security, in a cloud environment is really important.
The reality is that certain systems are more suited to a cloud environment than others but In truth, there is nothing that you CAN'T put into the cloud – we're at a point now where it is viable to run your entire infrastructure using cloud services if you wanted to.