Security and Scalability Challenges in Cloud

The buzzword or the hype around cloud computing has subsided now. It has been implemented and adopted by the enterprises. Many service providers are offering cloud based services now. The advent of cloud computing has made it possible for applications and data to reside on massively scalable data centers and can be accessed over Internet from anywhere and any device. The consumers do not have to worry about how much resource they need as the cloud service providers will ensure that the infrastructure is scalable to meet the resource demands. The consumers just have to pay for what they are using. Businesses can now harness power of super computers without owning them. This is an ideal cloud service usage model, but it poses many issues including security and scalability concerns that are yet to be addressed. Here are few concerns that Asoke K Talukder talked about during his session at Spark IT 2011.

Laws around the Cloud

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Imagine a scenario wherein a European organization is outsourcing services to India through a cloud service provider based in USA whose datacenters are located in China, Mexico and Pakistan. Then how can one ensure that the respective laws of each of the country involved are not violated. There are laws related to each country about what data can be transferred into the country, which data can be transferred out of the country. Some countries mandate that the data cannot be stored out of the country. The USA Patriot Act allows certain government organizations to examine any data within USA. Then, this becomes extremely difficult for the service provider to provide conformance to all international standards and be economical at the same time. This is a major challenge that's going to be in cloud pertaining to data location and the country's laws applicable on that data.

Security and scalability in the Cloud

Security is a major concern as you will be putting your enterprise data onto the cloud. The foremost challenge is the mindset; how much trust can a customer have on the service provider's cloud infrastructure as against his own physical infrastructure. And the other is to address the regulatory and compliance requirement of the environment when your application would be running on an infrastructure of a foreign land. For that matter the applications themselves have to be security aware. The application should be able to assess and safeguard customer's identity and data from theft and abuse. The application development paradigm which used only functional requirements should now incorporate non-functional requirements as well, which would cover the application's security requirements besides perfommance and quality. In the cloud infrastructure there would be many users simultaneously accessing their respective applications, the service provider has to ensure that the resource available to a particular application scales up as the demand comes. The application itself should be scalability aware so that it is able to react to external events like increased load, reliability and sudden change in cloud topology.