The Influence of the Cloud

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Influence of the Cloud

  • Not this year, no, maybe not even next year, until they address all the security concerns. i don't see my company doing that until that concern is tightened up more. 😀

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • Defining "cloud" as PaaS in this case:

    I'd say we're pulling back, but not for security reasons. Rather it's that we aren't getting the service we believe we contracted for. Ask for a new VM? Wait two weeks and then find out they don't think your contact covers that, so you go after them with a bat (or a lawyer) and finally get your VM a month after you asked for it. Soooo not effective or efficient.

    So we're pulling all our servers back in house where we can maintain them ourselves.

    It remains to be seen how long it will take to get a VM set up under the new scenario. :hehe:


    Here there be dragons...,

    Steph Brown

  • I'm in a Directors role now but was formerly a DBA for many years and still try to keep my hands in the dirt. I have to say that we are considering the cloud to help with test and dev environments. The concerns and issues around security have kept us from moving forward, especially since I work in the healthcare space, but we're now looking at tackling that concern with data masking. Masking all PHI in our test and dev environments somewhat alleviates the security and privacy concern.

    We think that putting our db's in the cloud and placing most of the maintenance and administration on the service provider will allow my DBA's to spend more time focused on the more critical production transaction systems.

    I don't think the cloud is going away, which also makes me think that eventually we technical folks will all be working for these service providers and very few will actually be working directly for the company’s that use the service.

  • Absolutely yes, we see the "Cloud" as the most significant development since the internet and will be developing all of our applications for this platform.

  • Next!

  • The organisation I work for is moving its entire server estate to AWS, so I definitely expect to be working more with the cloud in 2013 than this year.

    We got the go-ahead for this work in mid April, and expect to be 100% live in AWS in November, using a team of 5 FTE staff.

    We have had a successful POC that was designed to show that everything would work and could be secured. We are now in the final stages of the build, and gearing up for the acceptance and penetration tests. As part of the move, we are standardising on Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2012.

    The main driver for this work is cost reduction. For our approx 120 servers we are looking at total AWS costs of about USD $660k per annum, a saving of about USD $1.2m per annum compared to our previous hosting solution. Our experience so far is there is a learning curve to get the most out of AWS, but the benefits of cost reduction and improved performance are achievable.

    Having decided on the AWS route, we are already looking at the benefits we can get from evergreen server kit, and how we can move to the new high IOPS (SSD?) storage this year.

    Things are a bit hectic at present, but next year we hope to present what we have done at SQLBITS, PASS, and other conferences.

    Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.

    When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara

  • As anyone aware of the Matt Honan situation knows, one primary issue with "the cloud" is security.

    His home computer, iPhone, and iPad were all bricked by some hackers who used simple social engineering to trick Apple into thinking they were him. That particular hole has been plugged (or at least has a band-aid over it for now), but the most certain thing in such an interconnected environment is that the next exploit simply hasn't been brought to public awareness yet.

    There's always a trade-off between convenience of use and security, and "the cloud" swings heavily towards the "super duper hyper convenient" end of that spectrum.

    - Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
    Property of The Thread

    "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon

  • GSquared (8/20/2012)


    There's always a trade-off between convenience of use and security, and "the cloud" swings heavily towards the "super duper hyper convenient" end of that spectrum.

    Yep, and it's unfortunate that this is the case.

  • "Cloud" sounds to me to be a great marketing word. It could mean a lot of things or services but what they have in common is transferring private or company's data on someone elses machines within the web.

    Steve Wozniak recently spoke out his concerns about "the cloud" which are the lack of control over the data you have then.

    For my private use I do not think I will be using "the cloud" in the foreseeable future and I never did so. Instead I recently bought a good disk station from Synology for my home data and am happy with this.

    Be the services convenient or not. The inconveniences which might occur when a security leak or some other problem happens to the service provider outweights the conveniences for me.

    In case there is a problem with the data on my own storage at least I know whom to blame. Its me 🙂

    brgds

    Philipp Post

  • I can't imagine any sane bank, insurance company, or trading house putting a transaction system in the Cloud. Like the saying goes: you can't manage what you can't control and although you generally have a great deal of it in the Cloud, you're still very much dependent on the vendor and that may not be enough. I think the 'Cloud' is primarily going to be for mobile app developers for the forseeable future. That's still a major market though.

  • Our parent company started life as a statistical agent for the insurance industry and although it has grown steadily into the "risk management" space through acquisitions the vast bulk of the in-house data is and will be for the foreseeable future sensitive personal stuff. Although our IT management has flirted with the cloud concept, it's pretty much just a lot of dancing around a hot issue. The insurance industry is notoriously slow to adopt - almost anything - with notable exceptions like Progressive, and I don't expect to be surprised any time soon by a company announcement that we're moving anything to "the cloud".

  • cdonlan 18448 (8/20/2012)


    I can't imagine any sane bank, insurance company, or trading house putting a transaction system in the Cloud.

    Chances are the system that does your salary cheque is in the "cloud" and has been for donkey's years. It just existed before the name "cloud" was invented. Anyone remember EDI...Jeez, anyone born in green screen?

    I love Buck Woody's one line descriptions for current technology fads, I just wish he would do a one page blog of the top 20!

    The cloud is a portion of your computing you choose to do outside of your current infrastructure or organisation.

    The challenge my organisation faces is that data needs to flow to many places. If I need it to flow en-masse then this has big implications for where the start and end points are. If I can stick a big Hadoop cluster in the cloud and the means to interogate and present it co-located in the cloud then I'm onto a winner. The instant I want to move data in volume or high velocity from the cloud to my local computing storage I'm stuffed.

    I expect to be designing applications to be hybrid local and cloud transparent. Normal transactions local, overspill and peak demand utilising the cloud. The reason being cost. You either provision your entire infrastructure around your peak demand (which is expensive and wasteful) or you provision your infrastructure around your average demand.

  • David.Poole (8/20/2012)Chances are the system that does your salary cheque is in the "cloud" and has been for donkey's years. It just existed before the name "cloud" was invented. Anyone remember EDI...Jeez, anyone born in green screen?

    Yes, I remember the green screen. I'm thinking more along the lines of high-volume OLTP systems. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think of payroll systems in the same way as claims payment or market trading systems. At least not in terms of frequency and volume. If it helps you scale then I think that's great, but I think it's going to be more the exception then the rule for that class of systems.

  • A lot of people seem to be writing as though 'the cloud' is some homogenous entity that exists somewhere just this side of the horizon. This makes it easy to say 'the cloud' is not secure or not performant or not anything else that might benefit your organisation.

    In reality there are specific service offerings from a number of vendors, each of which has its own security, performance, stability and cost profile. Maybe it is time to stop being 1890 horse riders happily listing all the faults in these new-fangled automobiles and start looking at the merits the specific models have got.

    Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.

    When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara

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