Cloud Data Centers - Architectural Drivers

More and more data centers are moving to the cloud. It is estimated that over two-thirds of the data center traffic will be on the cloud by 2017. As per the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2013, Cloud Data Centers are seeing a 35% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) while the Traditional Data Centers are seeing only a 12% CAGR.

So what are the key drivers for a Cloud Data Center?

• It should provide organizations with Mobility
• It should enable Cloud Management with Security
• It should enable Application Transformation
• And lastly, it should turn Information into Insights to help organizations succeed

Mobility is the key for a Cloud Data Center. Your data should be available wherever you are in any part of the world! It should be safe and secure without any compromise. Management of your data center assets should not turn your hair white. It should be easy to manage, provision, de-provision and backup.

Elaborating a little on Application Transformation - today's applications have attributes like Dynamic Instantiation & Removal, multi-cloud models including hybrid clouds, multiple nodes and have different types of infrastructure demands that were non-existent a few years ago. Today, Infrastructure needs to be application aware for Agile placements, it should identify physical, virtual, cloud integrations, it should be flexible enough for a dynamic shared resource pooling and should be able to manage application clusters.

An optimum data center should give the business an insight into all the critical components of the data center and how each component is helping drive the business. What is the value add of each component and its availability - should be clearly showcased to the business.

So what are the Best Practices for a Cloud Ready Infrastructure?

• Consolidate & document your data center assets
• Develop your data center metrics - Power Utility Efficiency, Operational metrics, People metrics
• Identify & document the data, storage & application network requirements
• Develop & plan your data center architecture - Policies, Automation opportunities, fabric for the implementation
• Plan for the upgrade of your network access & aggregation layers - 10G/40G/100G, unified fabric etc, upgrade of the x86 assets, virtualization & server requirements.
• Identify Day 1, Day 30, Day 60, Day 90 operational requirements
• Plan for how you will deal with Disaster Recovery 
• And finally, develop your cloud management road map! 

Architectural Considerations for Cloud Security

As a CIO, one needs to understand the various factors that affect the implementation & performance of Cloud Security architecture. General issues involving regulatory requirements, standards compliance, security management, information classification and security awareness need to be considered along with more specific architectural related issues - trusted hardware & software, secure execution environment, secure communications and hardware augmentation using micro-architectures. These architectural issues are elaborated below.

Trusted Computing: Trusted cloud computing protects cloud systems from malicious intrusions, attacks, protects data in use by hypervisors & applications, provides for strong authentication, applies encryption to protect sensitive data & supports compliance through hardware & software. Protection domains are the execution & memory space assigned to each concurrent running process & they protect the programs from all unauthorized modification or executional interference. A trusted computing base is the total combination of protection mechanism including hardware, software & firmware that are trusted to enforce an organization's security policy.

Secure Execution Environment: In the cloud, applications run on different servers in a distributed mode and may contain sensitive data. The cloud service provider should have a secure execution environment that enables protected data transfers via strong authentication mechanisms and clients must implement best practices to address privacy & confidentiality of information exchange.

Secure Communications: Organizations should reevaluate their communications security policies once they move to the cloud as the cloud brings about newer challenges in this area. The communications referred here are both - data in motion & data at rest! Secure cloud communication revolves around structures, transmission methods, transport formats, security measures to provide confidentiality (network security protocols, authentication, data encryption), data integrity (firewall, communications security & intrusion detection), availability (logins, fault tolerance, backups, redundancy) & authentication for transmissions over public & private networks.

Micro-architectures: Micro-architectures can be designed as hardware accelerators for functions such as encryption, arithmetic functions & to secure web transactions to support cloud computing. Micro-architecture designs may include concepts related to Pipelining to increase performance by overlapping steps of different instructions, super-scalar processor to enable concurrent execution of multiple instructions and Very-Long Instruction Word Processing (VLIW) to specify a more than one concurrent operations in a single instruction.

To summarize, cloud computing security architecture is a critical element in establishing trust amongst users of the Cloud Services!

References: Cloud Security by Ronald L Krutz, Russell Dean Vines.
Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

Entertainment in the Cloud!

Entertainment industry is one of the hottest industries where millions are made & lost...Why should it not adopt to the latest & the greatest technologies? So there you go! This industry is rapidly adopting the Cloud Services in many many ways...When you are in a movie theater, you may not realize that so much of IT is needed to produce a single movie. Or for that matter, the computer / phone games that you play..have you ever stopped to think what is involved in creating a game? Oh yes, you guessed it right. A lot of hard work coupled with some serious piece of IT components including machines, software, hosted platforms and yes, Cloud Services!

So you would have a question as to how are Cloud Services related to the Entertainment Industry?

In fact, Cloud is the way to go for this industry, right from Content creation, to content processing (encoding / transcoding), to content delivery via streaming video and content management, storage for the huge media files, raw processing power provided by extensible resources on the cloud and the list goes on. 

Sony's "Music Unlimited by Qriocity" service on the Cloud, is being extended to France, Germany, Spain and Italy that is a subscription based service to enable fans to access music on their digital devices. This cloud service acts as a "locker" for a subscriber's own music collection so that they can access their music on different devices.

Apple has signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and is very near to completing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. One of the core features of a cloud music service is enabling consumers to store their songs on a company's servers. They can then access their libraries from Web-connected devices.

DreamWorks, one of the top movie studios in the world has signed up a multi-year deal with a Cloud Service provider that will allow DreamWorks to render computer animated films using elastic computing resources. Elastic cloud computing allows users to adjust computing capacity to meet their real-time needs.

You would be surprised to know that even the Adult Entertainment industry has taken a massive leap into the cloud by providing storage and playback of movies and video clips using a locker concept on their cloud servers!

Gaming on Demand, that delivers the latest high-end gaming titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macintosh® computers, is another cloud based service that is now making a ton of money. There are many players in this space and the number keeps growing everyday. OnLive is one of the biggest players in this segment competing directly with Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft's of this world! Other providers include Gaikai.com,Spoon.net and a whole bunch of others!

More and more people are getting rid of their cable service or their satellite services and moving to content on demand for their television, movies, games.  Music, movies and eBooks are all being delivered over the web to any number of platforms.  The Cloud makes this possible and should be an integral part of the Entertainment industry's strategy! 
Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more