Cloud myths, busted

Myth #1: The Cloud Isn’t Secure—Security in the Cloud isn’t bad, it’s just different. The key is to take a measured, careful approach to security issues. In the case of Cloud-enabled applications, techniques such as encryption, vulnerability management, IDS/IPS and overlay tools are available to achieve significant security accreditation when implemented correctly.

Myth #2: Cloud Computing Is Only For Small Business—With the right operational delivery capabilities, Medium sized organizations and large enterprises can move their applications to the cloud and use them anywhere, any time and with a level of security, reliability cost savings that they could never achieve on their own.

Myth #3: Cloud Environments Require Multi-Tenant Apps—Virtual Ark has the platform to migrate single or multi-tenant applications to the cloud with few if any code changes required and we do almost all of the work. In fact, the security, integration and performance requirements of large enterprise customers are often ill-suited to multi-tenant solutions. This is a key reason why SaaS adoption has not been faster in this market segment and why many ISVs have not modified their applications to be multi-tenant. The Virtual Ark Application Management Platform can manage dedicated instances of the application for specific customer needs as if they were “one” application instance and when no loss of efficiency when compared to a multi-tenant implementation.

Myth #4: Migrating Apps To The Cloud Is Easy— Taking full advantage of the cloud requires your application to first be migrated. Unenlightened individuals think you take an application, throw it on the cloud and it just “works.” Many existing enterprise applications have known scalability or resiliency issues. Is the application single tier or multi tier and how can the application be scaled up and scaled out? What is the geographic access required by the application and does it need to be deployed such that it can be accessed from a single location during a specific time window or will it be accessed globally 24×7? Next, there any dependencies the application has with other applications and also dependencies that may exist on shared data center infrastructure? All of these issues need to be addressed prior to migration.

Myth #5: Cloud Computing Is Unreliable—Many cloud providers offer a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA) and have spent millions and in some cases billions of dollars of capital in multiple geo-dispersed data centers. That level of investment in process, security and redundancy far exceeds what most customers can achieve at their own facilities.

Myth #6: Cloud Computing Is Not Private— In the worst case, you can put dedicated servers into your own private cloud and still gain many of the benefits of efficiency of resource utilization and have complete control over the data and compute infrastructure. However, even a public cloud can offer outstanding privacy and still greater efficiency over the private cloud by adhering to strict rules to limit the access of each individual user with strict enforcement of password policies and the use of strong encryption of data in motion and at rest.

Myth #7: Cloud Computing Offers No Cost Savings—The ability to tie your costs with your consumption is a fundamental cost savings that you can’t easily achieve on your own. While offerings vary, the main tenant of cloud computing is escaping the significant cost of most computing infrastructure, upgrades, and maintenance for a fractional monthly subscription.

Myth #8: Cloud Computing Is Just A New Name For The Same Old Stuff—Cloud computing is much more than just virtualization of servers in a datacenter. Cloud computing is shared technology and infrastructure services, offering on-demand delivery with pay as you go access.