4. Share Technology Issues: This is actually a valid concern. If a main firewall goes down, it has the potential to wreak havoc on an entire network. It’s the same story if a SAN decided to puke or a data center blew up. There is really no way around this, without spending gobs more money (meaning outlandish cost for the customer), however, the Claris infrastructure is much sounder than the average cloud provider. While Claris is not immune to the total destruction of its data center, no one is (not even users of in-house IT). Sure, my car could blow up on the way to the grocery store, but I still get in and go buy the milk. Much of that confidence comes because it’s well maintained have I have a great mechanic.
5. Data Loss or leakage: Again, this concern is common to all networking environments and is not specific to cloud computing in any way.
6. Account or Service Hijacking: This also is a concern in all networking environments, however with the
hybrid cloud model it is no worse (no higher risk) than a physical box deployment, as none of our service accounts have access to more than one network.
7. Unknown Risk Profile: a classic anti-cloud argument…fear of the unknown. Basically the cloud hasn’t been around long enough at such large scale deployments for specific attacks to be developed targeting the infrastructure itself instead of individual services. Say, for example, a sweeping VMware attack that goes after the actual ESX kernel. This could be a valid argument in the future, but as of today, in my opinion, fear of the unknown is just that.
Much of this is beyond the scope of the end user’s concern. Some of these comments may even make some readers MORE anxious about the cloud. But, that’s the risk I run in doing a blog post on the RISKS of cloud computing. My point here is to look these risks in the eye and show them the guns in the arsenal at Claris. There are risks in all service industries, and the potential for failure grows with the complexity of the service. When evaluating a cloud provider, get one that’s honest about threats, unafraid of the technical battle ahead and one that has really big guns.