I have heard this question over and over again in the past 12 months: customers, prospects, even colleagues ask me what they should believe or who should they trust when it comes to the Cloud.
Having attended many tradeshows about Cloud, SaaS, Big Data, the fact is, this expertise is in the hands of specialist providers offering cloud platforms. They have experienced issues with hosted services, have faced cyber-attacks of multiple sorts, but these cloud professionals such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, IBM and Akamai just to name a few, have consolidated knowledge regarding security and continue to fight for our protection in the Cloud.
They organize challenges around hacking and offer prizes to any hackers who can find holes in their security layer. They hire former hackers to reinforce their knowledge about hacking technics.
I have heard of a multinational bank who said that they couldn’t match their own staff’s level of expertise provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). So this bank went through a series of studies and finally opted to push some of their banking products into the Cloud. They mention the fact that their data is safer in the cloud than in their own on-premise data-center.
So as long as you follow the rules, best practices, and be professional about your data storage and the writing of your web based business applications - it ultimately becomes the same whether to your organization’s cloud deployed on-premise (own data-center, private cloud) or set up as a public-cloud.
(Watch the Video) Great primer on Public, Private & Hybrid Clouds
Today, you have the choice to choose between public cloud (existing out of the box services, self-service based type SaaS platforms, for example: Salesforce, Office365, etc.), private cloud externally hosted (to deploy your own business applications: banking web-apps) and private cloud hosted on premise.
Most likely your cloud environment will be hybrid with a mix of applications located in public cloud and private cloud. Align with IT with the business. As a CIO meet with your COO or CDO (Chief Data Officer) to set KPIs and metrics so your particular install of the Cloud is delivering results to the business.
Make a decision and take the time to focus on you core business and on your customers – that’s the benefit of the Cloud.
