Communications - June 2010

practice

Doi: 10.1145/1743546.1743565

Article development led by queue.acm.org

Elastic computing has great potential,
but many security challenges remain.
BY Dustin o Wens
securing
elasticity in
the cloud

As soMe WhAT of a technology-hype curmudgeon, I was until very recently in the camp that believed cloud computing was not much more than the latest marketing-driven hysteria for an idea that has been around for years. Outsourced IT infrastructure services, aka Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has been around since at least the 1980s, delivered by the telecommunication companies and major IT outsourcers. Hosted applications, aka Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), were in vogue in the 1990s in the form of application service providers (ASPs).

Looking at cloud computing through this perspective had me predicting how many more months it would be before the industry came up with another “exciting” technology with which to generate mass confusion and buzz. However, I have recently been enlightened as to the true potential of cloud computing and have become very excited

about it, to say the least. This concept, which has generated the most industry hype in years—and which has executives clamoring for availability because of promises of substantial IT cost savings and innovation possibilities—has finally won me over.

So, what did I discover about cloud computing that has made a convert out of someone who was so adamantly convinced that it was nothing more than the latest industry topic du jour? First let me explain that it was no small feat. It took a lot of work to sort through the amazing amount of confusion concerning the definition of cloud computing, let alone find a nugget of real potential. Definitions abound, and with my curmudgeon hat still solidly in place I was beginning to see a lot of hair-splitting and “me too” definitions that just seemed to exacerbate the problem. I finally settled on the definition provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) because of the simplicity the framework provides (see the accompanying sidebar). Still, it wasn’t until a good friend who had already discovered the true potential hidden in all this madness provided me with some real-world use cases for elasticity that the light began shining very brightly.

Elasticity, in my very humble opinion, is the true golden nugget of cloud computing and what makes the entire concept extraordinarily evolutionary, if not revolutionary. NIST’s definition of elasticity ( http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ SNS/cloud-computing/) is as follows: “Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.” When elasticity is combined with on-demand self-service capabilities it could truly become a game-changing force for IT.