The real concerns about Cloud infrastructure (as it is today)

While “private clouds may not be the future” they are definitely needed today. Here are some of the top issues bothering some organizations which have been thinking about going into the cloud. Some of issues were based on Craig Bolding’s talk on “Guide to cloud security”.

• Unlike your own data center, you will never know what the cloud vendors are running, or how they backup, or what their DR plans are. They will say you shouldn’t care, but do you remember what happened to the Tmobile customer’s on Danger ?
• Uptime, availability and responsiveness is less predictable than in a self hosted environment. In most cases the cloud vendors may not even choose to let customers know about major maintenance if they don’t anticipate any issues. Organizations who manage their own infrastructure would always try to avoid doing two major changes which have interdependencies.
• Multi-Tenancy means you may have to worry about a noisy neighbor.
• Muti-Tenancy could also lead one to interesting issues which were never thought about before. What if there was a way to do an “injection attack”. Depending on how Multi-Tenancy is implemented, you could potentially touch other customers data.
• Infrastructure and platform lock-in issues are worrying for many organizations who are thinking long term. Most cloud vendors don’t really have a long history to show their track record.
• Change control and detailed change log is missing.
• Individual customers don’t have much decision making power on what a vendor should do next. In a privately hosted environment the stake holders are asked before something is done, but in larger infrastructure, you are a small fish in a huge pond.
• Most cloud vendors have multiple layers of cloud infrastructure dependent on each other. Its hard to understand how issues around one type of cloud could impact others. This is especially true from Security view point. A bad flaw in a lower layer of the architecture could impact all other platforms built over it.
• Moving applications to cloud means dealing with a different style of programming designed for horizontal scalability, data consistency issues, health monitoring, load balancing, managing state, etc.
• Identify management is still in early stages. Integration with corporate Identify management infrastructure would be important to make it easy for individuals from large organizations on external clouds.
• Who takes care of scrubbing disks when data is moved around ? What about data on backup tapes ? This is very important in application handling highly sensitive data.
• Just like credit card fraud, one has to worry about CPU time fraud. Is the current billing and reporting good enough to help large organizations figure out what is real and what could be fraud ? They need a real-time fraud detection mechanism. And what about loss of service due to DOS attacks ? Who pays for that ?
• Need a better mechanism to bill large corporations.
• On the non-technical side, there are a lot of questions related to SLAs, Compliance issues, Terms of services, Legal issues around cross border services, and even questions about whether law enforcement have a different set of rules when search and seizure is required.
• Not too far from being another form of “outsourcing”.

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