BTC Insight » SLAs

Cloud SLA Standards

Charlton — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:37:10 +0000

SLAs and security go together; each is meaningless without the other. As the cloud computing market matures, vendors will differentiate themselves by the security features (and other SLA details) they provide. The spectacular failure of Sidekick/Microsoft-Danger; Amazon and Google’s outages; and the shrug-and-grin policy of Yahoo! are all examples of cloud FAILs due to weak or non-existent SLAs. Referencing existing (i.e., pre-cloud and non-cloud) standards for security, auditability, data retention and destruction, reliability, availability, etc., is an unambiguous way of specifying exactly what the vendor will provide and exactly what the consumer can expect.

If you are a provider or consumer, what standards would we want in the SLAs? Here are [...]

Why Microsoft/Danger represents Traditional Browser-based Cloud #FAIL

Charlton — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:32:08 +0000

The very public and spectacular Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick failure has been a rallying cry for those who detract as well as over-simplify Cloud Computing. A large part of the discussion has focussed on the fragility of CC services and storage, and the over-hying of CC. However, this reaction is itself anti-CC hype, failing to truly understand the implications of the failure. A recent blog entry from Dan Dilger provides a reasoned analysis that should provide a cautionary tale against:

Assuming “if you build it, they will come” (referring to wishful-thinking RAS), Shrug-and-grin, fluff SLAs (referring to “SLAs” which essentially state “caveat emptor” and “we are [...]

CIA endorses Private Cloud Computing

Charlton — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:47:48 +0000

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139016/CIA_endorses_cloud_computing_but_only_internally

One of the U.S. government’s strongest advocates of cloud computing is also one of its most secretive operations: the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has adopted cloud computing in a big way, and the agency believes that the cloud approach makes IT environments more flexible and secure.

Jill Tummler Singer, the CIA’s deputy CIO, said that she sees enormous benefits to a cloud approach. And while the CIA has been moving steadily to build a cloud-friendly infrastructure — it has adopted virtualization, among other things — cloud computing is still a relatively new idea among federal agencies.

“Cloud computing as a term [...]

Cloud Security Issues – and SLAs – get real

Charlton — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:34:14 +0000

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/05/amazon_bitbucket_outage/

DDoS attack rains down on Amazon cloud Code haven tumbles from sky

“Updated Web-based code hosting service Bitbucket experienced more than 19 hours of downtime over the weekend after an apparent DDoS attack on the sky-high compute infrastructure it rents from Amazon.com.

This in turn left many developers without access to code projects hosted on Bitbucket, a GitHub-like service based on the Mercurial version control system.

“Looks like all (my and a large number of fellow nerds) bitbucket projects have evaporated in a temporary, cloudy way. This is a major pissoff,” said one Reg reader and Bitbucket user, as others vented via Twitter.

But on another level, the news is sure to fuel [...]