Great Debate - Interop Weathermen Tell Which Way The Cloud Blows

The session on "The Great Debate - Are Clouds More Secure?" revealed two things.  This is a rather simplistic question, and the answers were completely self-serving.  Cloud providers advocated cloud security as at least as good as traditional net security; security providers, consultants and traditional IT had key reservations.  And in this Oxford style debate, the latter successfully scared the crap out of an unsure audience - 8 audience members who went in trusting the cloud were swayed to serious doubt.

A bit more quantitative was a survey of 94 IT execs at Interop, conducted by Network Instruments.  This survey revealed that:

• 61% have cloud services running on their nets, a big jump from a year ago.
• 50% have deployed a private cloud.
• 21% of apps run in the cloud, and this is forecast to be 38% next year.
• 61% say availability improved over last year; 50% said scalability has.

But perhaps the key finding is that 60% said their ability to troubleshoot worsened. It became much more difficult in the past year to show that the leak is on the cloud provider’s boat.  The ability to audit cloud performance and hold the provider accountable is critical.

The real answer to the overall question is, it depends.  The more voluminous, static and relatively insensitive the data involved is, the more the cloud makes sense.  And the more dynamic the application is, and the more important it is to deploy it quickly, the more the cloud makes sense.