Cloud Services: Your Rocket Ship Control Board

The move to the cloud — in many ways — is a return to the early days of computing. When I took my first computer class in 1978, we used an IBM 360 system time share. We rented out time on a remote system — sent our jobs over a modem to a computer at a university — and got back the results of the program run.

Today, we’re using the cloud, which is just a fancy version of the old time-share systems.

Unlike the old time share days, you have much more control over how those remote resources are used and configured. In fact, with the internet, you can make those resources available to anyone and everyone: on purpose or by accident. That’s the beauty and the danger.

Cloud Management Consoles are your portal to the controls of the rocket ship to the clouds. You can set up many types of computing resources to run your jobs. They can be for your private use or something like a web server that’s open to the world.  And it all comes down to what you choose and how you configure it.

Controlling those configurations and ensuring they are configured correctly is a new area that Security and Change Management people should be just as concerned about as datacenter assets. Reducing the risk of leaking information is paramount. Knowing what the configurations are set to, whether they are securely configured and whether they change os even more important in the cloud environment. That last point is very important. Is a change going to send your rocket to the wrong destination?

You need the same level of security, compliance and operational controls in the cloud as you do in your on-prem environment. There are new types of service in the cloud, such (Read more...)