By Lt. General P.C. Katoch (Retd) Former Director General of Information Systems, Indian Army

Cloud represents a fundamental shift in computing, providing a platform for agile and cost-effective business applications and IT infrastructure. Simply put, it is convergence of virtualisation and utility based billing. How does one choose a cloud solution? Logically, it should support private networking, enterprise grade virtual appliances with full visibility into the life cycle of IT applications running, adequate security and accountability. The architecture should support hybrid computing, combining cloud infrastructure and dedicated infrastructure in a single solution, enabling dynamic provisioning of resources to meet workloads. Though private clouds allow customers full control of IT platform, switch to an enterprise cloud will significantly decrease deployment time while increasing scale and stability. Enterprise cloud services should minimally include virtual networking, virtual computing, virtual storage and virtual disaster recovery.

Limitations of public cloud is under constant debate, major issues being authentication/user access models, requirements of invoicing and billing, incorporating traditional ways to interact with customers, quantum of firewalls (firewall in every virtual machine’s operating system), service management and monitoring health, performance and availability of virtual machines. Profitable business requires analysing cloud economics including expenses like storage though theoretically cloud computing should avoid major new capital expenditure and operational expense. Some feel that companies might be able to save upfront capital expenditures, but not many may actually pay more as operating expenses. Where capital expense are relatively small, or where the organisation has more flexibility in capital budget than operating budget, cloud model may not make great fiscal sense. Other factors having an impact on cost savings include efficiency of a company's data centre as compared to the cloud vendor's, existing operating costs, level of adoption of cloud computing and type of functionality being hosted in the cloud.

Security is a major concern. Users naturally are concerned about the security, access and privacy of their own data in the cloud. Goals of computer and network security fundamentally are confidentiality, integrity and availability. Can cloud providers monitor communication and data stored? Can unauthorised users gain access to your confidential data? Will users need to adopt community or hybrid clouds that are typically more expensive and may offer restricted benefits? What about acceptable levels of availability and performance of applications hosted in the cloud? Cloud providers argue that because threats in cloud computing are same as in virtualisation and even if you're not using the cloud, you rely on and trust network service providers, hardware vendors, software vendors, service providers and data sources. One can assume that while there are both advantages and challenges in cloud computing, key security issues like trust, multi-tenancy, encryption and compliance needs to be addressed.

Numerous benefits of cost savings, power savings, green savings, and increased agility in software deployment recommend migration to clouds, but cloud security may actually drive and define how we adopt and deploy cloud solutions. Can strong security controls provide leeway to adopt the most cost effective approach assuming that massive public clouds may be more cost effective than large community clouds which again may be more cost effective than small private clouds? Issues of cloud adoption, organisational impact, economics and change management need analyses. Thought also needs to be given to issues like flexibility and innovation— are we offering monopoly on the plate to big players, who owns the data, what rules and policies will apply if data is abroad, what happens if the data is lost, what happens if the remote server breaks down crashes, what happens if the cloud server is backed up and the internet is running slow, will normal applications need adaptation with cloud systems using different protocols/APIs/workflow systems, what business losses will occur if a rouge country interferes with internet, etc on balance, the many advantages of cloud computing need to be optimised by analysing all the above issues and arriving at a sound cloud strategy that suits individual industry.