There of course business concerns with cloud computing such as reliability, security, and cost however after having spent significant time with EC2 and goGrid over the last 6 months there are also very many drawbacks to each way of implementing a cloud.
Examples such as, EC2 instances always have dynamic IPs. This is fine most of the time but when one of your AD's DNS instances restarts and is assigned a new private IP address you do have a bit of work on your hands (I have hopes of working around this with VPC but haven't found the time). GoGrid doesn't have a perimeter firewall and instead depends upon the windows firewall to secure each instance. You can create a centOS gateway to act as your firewall but are now adding more complexity. Also, if you do find yourself in EC2 plan your security groups well! Membership can't be changed once an instance is started, though an instance may belong to any number of groups You will find other limitations as you deploy into the cloud, most of which can be gotten around with a little extra elbow grease and scripting. We currently are going hybrid with a private cloud as the central site and cloud sites in supporting rules tied together through CentOS openVPN instances. Is it pretty? No. Is it cheaper than multiple DR sites? Absolutely! From: Alex Eckelberry [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 10:05 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Cloud computing... your opinions We're working on cloud computing initiatives (like everyone), and I'm also doing a fair amount of research into the area. (Of course, the whole idea of "cloud computing" is itself fairly silly, when it's just a renaming of the concept of a network-connected computer. But whatever, it's the hot topic.) There are areas where it makes sense, such as email filtering. Web filtering, well maybe not so much. CRM (like SalesForce.com), makes sense. I'm curious -- what are your thoughts on cloud computing? What might be the security questions you would ask your cloud computing vendors? What irks you about it? What is good about it? Alex Alex Eckelberry, CEO Sunbelt Software 33 N. Garden Avenue, Clearwater, FL 33755 p: 727-562-0101 x220 e: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> MSN: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> w: www.sunbeltsoftware.com<http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com> b: www.sunbeltblog.com<http://www.sunbeltblog.com> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
