Public cloud is here to stay – Get ready to protect your data

Sunil Chavan

INDIA: Cloud computing has captured its share of headlines in recent years. While the debate over what kind of cloud is best for which business continues to generate a lot of heat, one thing is certain: the adoption of cloud solutions is accelerating, especially in Asia.

Some recent estimates have found that two-thirds of organisations in Asia already use some form of cloud computing solution and also that a surprisingly high number has chosen to take the public cloud route.

The popularity of public clouds isn't confined to Asia. According to IDC, last year’s global spending on public IT cloud services was approximately $47.4 billion. What’s more, IDC expects that to grow five times faster than the IT industry average between now and 2017 when it will hit US$107 billion. Forrester Research is even more positive, predicting that the global public cloud market will reach $191 billion by 2020.

Under pressure

Public clouds certainly offer numerous advantages. They can be quick to deploy, require no up-front investment and are highly flexible. This, in turn, enables businesses to respond rapidly to changes in the market and capture new opportunities.

It is all very much in line with the shift towards business-defined IT, a model in which business leaders and IT managers jointly develop business and technical goals for a more technology-enabled business. And that shift is increasing.

Public clouds also deliver lower infrastructure costs thanks to economies of scale. However, this benefit is sometimes seen as a double-edged sword by CIOs and CFOs under pressure to find cost-effective alternatives to support IT functions in their organisations. While public cloud offerings are affordable, the same CIOs and CFOs are also worried about security and access issues.

That is driven, at least partly, by the popular perception that the public cloud is inherently insecure. The risks are real, but the danger is not the cloud; it is how the data in the cloud is managed.

According to a report on Global Encryption Trends by Thales e-security and the Ponemon Institute, all too often it is being done badly, or not at all. More and more organisations are transferring sensitive or confidential information to public cloud services. Yet, while the use of encryption is increasing, more than half of respondents to the Thales survey admitted that their data still goes unprotected when it is stored in the cloud.

Clearly, many people in businesses – even IT professionals – are not aware of how to set the right security policies for different types of data that is moved into public clouds. For example, marketing collateral requires little protection; in fact, the more people who see it the better. Financial information is quite another matter and needs cast iron security.

The question that few people are asking is do they really need to know?

Concierge in the cloud

Surely, a better approach would be to develop an automatic system to govern the movement of data between public and private clouds? A kind of “concierge in the cloud”, complete with a simple dashboard to easily view where the data sits, would make management and security easier for all concerned.

There is no need to adopt an “all or nothing” cloud strategy. By properly classifying data and moving encrypted data to a public cloud, companies can do a better job protecting their really critical information and use public clouds safely.

In essence, this approach helps businesses transition from pure on-premise IT to private clouds, and from private clouds to hybrid clouds. What's more, it facilitates a more decentralised, democratised and mobile workforce by ensuring “always-on”, on-the-go access to important data from any IP-enabled device, including mobile phones and tablets – while remaining secure at all times.

Seeing is believing

So, what should an effective private to public cloud management solution look like? Ideally, it would include archiving, back-up free storage, and cloud – all in a single platform. It must also be easy to set up, manage and adapt.

With such solutions, organisations and cloud service providers can easily store, share, synchronise, protect, preserve, analyse and retrieve file data from a single system. This is more efficient and easier than any manual approach, and handles much more data than traditional file storage solutions.

In IT environments where data grows quickly or must be stores and archived for years, these capabilities are invaluable.

In addition, access to information in public, private and hybrid clouds must be secure and available across multiple devices without sacrificing control, visibility or security policies in the data centre.

Last, but not least, it has to be affordable.

That may sound like a tall order for something that is expected to provide so many new features. But it is definitely doable by leveraging cloud topologies, virtual solutions, operational automation, enhanced content distribution, remote system configuration, and cost-effective public cloud services.

(Sunil Chavan is Senior Director, Solution Sales, Asia Pacific at Hitachi Data Systems. The views expressed here are of the author and CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse them)