Does a High-Performance Cloud Make For More Work?

A couple of quick thoughts here, mostly around the changing scale of the task of securing information in the cloud.

I think we see a couple of interesting trends here and they are, well, not necessarily complementary. The first is that the cloud providers are getting serious about scaling their operations for the future. GigaOM reported on Salesforce.com's long-term plans to provide the performance and reliability that massive cloud deployments are going to need in order to be safe for enterprise consumption:

“Salesforce.com must be able to ensure optimal performance, which likely is why Guerrera emphasized that network density is one of the company’s key criteria in selecting data center sites.”

Not surprising – you can't doubt that Salesforce has bet big time on cloud and continues to back that up with investments  to position it as a heavyweight provider.

At the same time, I found this by a good friend and long-time security researcher Michael Angelo, on managing data in the cloud. Organizations moving significant quantities of information up to the cloud to take advantage of this investment needed to plan carefully around data lifecycle management.

It's not just a case of whether the data is available now, when I need it (although it better be). Rather, the problem comes *after* I no longer need that information. How do I know it's gone, not just lying dormant, waiting to resurface on someone else’s system?

The question is that as the capacity to move, store, process and replicate data continues to expand, and expands at an explosive rate, will the processes needed to manage that data grow with it?  How fast can IT and security teams scale what they already do, and adapt/improve it, to meet the potential demand for good governance in the brave new world of high-performance, high-availability, high-capacity cloud that the vendors are building?

The desire to build faster cars spurred the development of better brakes and improved handling because without them, there'd be a lot more crashes and a lot less happy customers. Now would be a good time to think about how to avoid high-speed collisions out there in the, now rather cloudy, information super highway.

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