Cloud services, hosting providers and in-house data centres are all the same

Cloud computing comes to NERSC (Photo credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

What have Amazon Web Services, Google Gmail, and IBM data centre in Auckland in common? They all failed and became inaccessible at one point or another. Just as many others.

Can we really rely on cloud services? Are they solid enough?
Yes, they are, provided you have done a good risk analysis, understand what your company is getting and mitigated the risks accordingly. Cloud services or hosting providers are just like in-house hosting:

• Both can fail and become inaccessible
• Both can get attacked and broken into

In all cases you need to ask yourself the same questions:

• Confidentiality
• How can I prevent unauthorized access to the information?
• Attackers will try to get access to your data regardless of where it is hosted.
• Integrity
• How can I ensure the data is not being tampered with?
• Voluntary or involuntary modification of your data can occur in your data centre just as it could in the cloud
• Availability
• How can I guarantee a level of availability which is in line with the business needs?
• Your physical or virtual servers can go down, the application can fail, the network can crash, the SAN can fail, your ISP can go down, just like your power or you cloud provider.

Regardless of the option you prefer you'll have choices to make, risks to take or to mitigate, and your environment may suffer. Just make sure you evaluate the CIA of your solution carefully, that the business understands the current risk position and that your have a Business Continuity Plan in place.