Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Security, Availability, and Performance - Sound familiar?

It's worth revisiting the IDC Study on the key challenges facing Cloud Computing. The top three are: Security, Availability, and Performance.



Availability is often seen as being under the general "security" umbrella (e.g. a Denial-of-Service attack affects availability), so #1 and #2 are linked.

#3 on the list, performance, has particular relevance to Cloud Service Broker models, since it is vital that anything which is acting as an intermediary between the consumer and the cloud must not introduce undue latency. This is also a consideration in the world of SOA, where intermediaries (an XML Gateway) must be high-performance, and must also, in fact, offload functionality from applications (thus providing acceleration).

A Cloud Service Broker also addresses the interoperability issues which are seen further down IDC's list, by smoothing over the differences between Cloud APIs, and indeed between different versions of the same Cloud API from the same Cloud provider.