The State of the Cloud

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

  • I look at putting data in the cloud as the worst possible thing you can do with it.

    Every hacker in the world can get at it.

    Yes M$, and Google have oodles of money, but are you sure you ISP is going to be there tomorrow?

    Are you sure you can get to the internet quickly 24/7?

    What is the ISP backup plan? And where do you rank to the Fortune 500 company for restoration?



    ----------------
    Jim P.

    A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.

  • Jim P. (5/4/2013)


    I look at putting data in the cloud as the worst possible thing you can do with it.

    Every hacker in the world can get at it.

    Yes M$, and Google have oodles of money, but are you sure you ISP is going to be there tomorrow?

    Are you sure you can get to the internet quickly 24/7?

    What is the ISP backup plan? And where do you rank to the Fortune 500 company for restoration?

    Normally I do my best to edit the post I am responding to, but you didn't allow that luxury. Why? Because everything you said is spot on and requires repeating!

    I am unsure of the actual company name, but we have all heard their commercials - a company that sells "reputation defense" on the Internet just announced it got hacked. Yes, the company that prides itself on protecting you from inaccurate information, which of course requires protecting their data from hackers, couldn't complete step one in providing the service they are selling!

    How many times have we heard of DNS attacks bringing down things

    The government has attempted to ram CISPA down our throats multiple times, and will try again. This allows them to demand access to every scrap of data they wish, and it allows companies the right to access it and I believe even sell it, becuase it exempts companies from every agreement you signed when you gave them your data.

    I am sure there are some protections out there. I am even more sure that for every protection there are even more ways to attack and overcome those, and now the government is doing the same thing!

    Oh, did I forget to mention that the US federal government web sites were infecting users with drive by malware? No? Sorry, I was too busy laughing at the state of data security in our country.

    If your data is important enough to demand protection, why would you entrust it to someone else? If it isn't important enough, why bother saving it online somewhere?

    Dave

  • According to the two posts above, I am no longer alone in my thoughts about the "cloud". 😀

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

  • At SQL Bits Connor Cunnigham gave the keynote speech on SQL Azure. Engineer for failure. 99.9% availability, unpredictable performance, multi-tenancy meaning you have 180 connections to a single SQL Azure instance rather than 32K connections in native SQL Server.

    Hard throttling, you connections get killed

    Soft throttling, your app has to have retry capability.

    I'm less worried about security. Your pay roll has been done in the clouds for over a decade. I'd be more worried about social engineering hacks that technical hacks.

    Then you have co-location of your data. report server in your company + data in the cloud = huge bills. The "cure" is to stick your report server in the cloud. The more uses you find for your data the more of your tools you have to stick in the cloud to get around the transmission costs.

    Better make sure you pay your cloud vendor on time, they've got you over a barrel. One flick of a switch and you are out of business.

    I particularly liked Denny Cherry's cloud story during his "Always On" talk. He had to take a bit of an indirect route to find out the extra storage his client had purchased was multi-tennanted and his client's DB server shared storage with a file server belonging to a different company. First time the fileserver attempted a defrag the DB experienced a world of pain!

    The cloud has its uses. I know of one company that had to convert a huge number of PDF documents. They spun up thousands of instances in their cloud provider and did the whole lot in very little time and far less money than it would normally take. OK, that's hardly 24/7 99.999% availability but it illustrates that the cloud is a tool for a job, its just that people make the wrong assumptions about what the tool is and what it is for. As a friend says, its like picking your nose with a shotgun!

  • And even though my company has some data in the cloud, it's always good to remember that a cloud is, by definition, vaporware.


    And then again, I might be wrong ...
    David Webb

  • I think it's a "right tool for the right job" scenario. Most of the folks who object to putting data in the cloud are thinking about mission critical and highly private data and I'd definitely agree that nobody should be pushing that stuff up to the cloud.

    But there's alot of data that isn't described by that. I recently worked at a company that had a need to allow geographically diverse users to be able to scan documents in and have those documents easily visible to other users. Essentially they were building up a knowledge base based on a set of their business documents. The documents weren't in any way private and the paper copies were still being archived off to a physical warehouse so data loss wasn't a significant worry either. For that scenario the cloud provided a level of convenience that probably couldn't have been achieved with the in-house infrastructure.

  • FunkyDexter (5/7/2013)


    I think it's a "right tool for the right job" scenario. Most of the folks who object to putting data in the cloud are thinking about mission critical and highly private data and I'd definitely agree that nobody should be pushing that stuff up to the cloud.

    But there's alot of data that isn't described by that. I recently worked at a company that had a need to allow geographically diverse users to be able to scan documents in and have those documents easily visible to other users. Essentially they were building up a knowledge base based on a set of their business documents. The documents weren't in any way private and the paper copies were still being archived off to a physical warehouse so data loss wasn't a significant worry either. For that scenario the cloud provided a level of convenience that probably couldn't have been achieved with the in-house infrastructure.

    Very true. As much as people want to say the cloud isn't safe, it's hacked, it won't work, that's only partially true. For some things it won't. For some it will.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor (5/7/2013)


    FunkyDexter (5/7/2013)


    I think it's a "right tool for the right job" scenario. Most of the folks who object to putting data in the cloud are thinking about mission critical and highly private data and I'd definitely agree that nobody should be pushing that stuff up to the cloud.

    But there's alot of data that isn't described by that. I recently worked at a company that had a need to allow geographically diverse users to be able to scan documents in and have those documents easily visible to other users. Essentially they were building up a knowledge base based on a set of their business documents. The documents weren't in any way private and the paper copies were still being archived off to a physical warehouse so data loss wasn't a significant worry either. For that scenario the cloud provided a level of convenience that probably couldn't have been achieved with the in-house infrastructure.

    Very true. As much as people want to say the cloud isn't safe, it's hacked, it won't work, that's only partially true. For some things it won't. For some it will.

    Cringe!

    As much as people want to say the cloud isn't safe, it's hacked, ... that's only partially true.

    No, that part is 100% true. It is also true that non cloud storage isn't safe, it's hacked and has similar risks. Never as many, see my note below.

    As much as people want to say the cloud ... won't work, that's only partially true. For some things it won't. For some it will.

    Your statement is true.

    What it comes down to is this. If my environment has a security risk of any kind, and if I expect my users to access data in the cloud, then the cloud contains all of the risks of the environment of the cloud vendor, plus all the risks of my enviornment! It is NEVER more secure if anyone inside my enviornment accesses it. It MAY BE more secure if all access to the cloud comes from OUTSIDE my enviornment because then my environment's flaws are irrelevant. That simply isn't how we typically use "cloud" resources in most businesses.

    We can debate things all we want, but the simple fact is that if someone hacks my systems, they may gain access to data. The same is true in the cloud. When we add them together we do NOT get increased security, we get less security. No matter what the vendor does, they have to allow access to the company contracting them to provide cloud services. By definition, that means that any flaws the customer has is still there. Hack in to the customer environemnt, piggy back to their cloud provider, you now have access to the cloud provider's systems. Hopefully just the ones that the customer contracted for, but all too often, all the other cloud vendor's customer data as well.

    Dave

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