The history of computing is the history of the back-and-forth between whether an individual computer should be in place or remote. The earliest computers were huge devices, but by the sixties and seventies they were replaced by terminals from which users, often in universities or large corporations, would dial in to a larger central mainframe.
This was followed by the rise of the personal computer; now you could have the power of a mainframe in your home or on your desk. In the last decades we have adopted something between the personal computer and mainframe eras; we have a powerful computer at our disposal (increasingly laptops or tablets), but they are always connected to either the internet at large and/or private networks (such as a company’s own intranet) that is hosted by a cloud service provider.
Today the cloud market is dominated by a handful of ‘hyperscalers’; companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM cloud and Oracle. It is possible to buy time on super-computers for less than a Netflix subscription, and to purchase gigabytes of storage for less than the price a cup of coffee.
This gives companies the ability to scale incredibly quickly, since they can buy new capacity much more easily than if they had to build that capacity in their own data centre. It is also disaster-proof (hyperscalers have multiple back-ups around the world in case one is destroyed) and will benefit from first-tier security.
The advantages of this are obvious; new capacities can be bought online almost instantly, cloud services are almost always cheaper than building your own data centres and the security is likely to be very high. That doesn’t mean that cloud services are the only way that organizations can access high-quality, high-capacity, scalable computing power, and that in turn doesn’t mean that companies have to go back to having their own on-premises servers. Using the existing hyperscaler web services can be powerful, but it can also be limiting – if your needs are very specific, e.g. requiring industry-specific certification such as PCI PIN, or are very sensitive to data protection issues like GDPR compliance, then you may not be able to find a good fit in existing services and may need to use smaller (but by no means small) data centres.
What is possible with cloud computing?
Digital Realty is one such data centre operator that can provide services that are as powerful as hyperscalers but can offer more flexibility. Take for example its work with buy-now-pay-later company Afterpay. The company’s proprietary decision-making engine needs to be able to determine credit worthiness instantly, while their platform needs to process billions of sales.
Since the company experiences three-figure year-on-year growth, their capacities need to expand rapidly. This is something that existing hyperscaler data centres can provide, but they could struggle with the very specific needs of a company that is providing consumer payments services across several countries.
Similarly, Telefónica UK, which operates as O2 in the UK, needed a solid infrastructure for the expansion of its My O2 app. It had already experienced scalability problems with its current solutions, but found that with Digital Realty it was able to improve customer experience and create a solid foundation for further growth. The commerce platform Criteo had different goals. While cloud computing is an improvement on traditional IT, large data centres consume a lot of electricity and water for cooling. Criteo was able to meet its ESG goals by operating their own bespoke data centre service.
Security and cloud computing
As mentioned, hyperscalers have a very high level of security. They have to, a distributed denial of service attack could take thousands of sites offline, and penetrating the security of one cloud service could open as many organisations to attack.
This would seem to be an argument for using hyperscalers instead of more bespoke systems – all the customisable systems in the world mean nothing if your service isn’t secure. However, the reality is that bespoke systems can have the same level of security that major cloud providers enjoy and can in fact provide greater security because they offer bespoke services.
The security on major cloud providers is very strong, but it is also off-the-shelf, and may not have the exact requirements for heavily regulated industries, especially those which operate in a number of territories. It may be possible to rig together a solution, but there are ways to create security that are ideally suited to cloud data services.
When we look at the most common security threats to cloud platforms, we can see that they all come from areas, such as identity, credential and key management – emphasizing the fact that attackers no longer try to hack digital systems, but attempt to steal identities in order to gain access. Similarly, system vulnerabilities can be introduced by stringing together multiple systems to enable a bespoke security system. These are no longer a problem, provided businesses have the right specialist security solutions in place.
Such solutions are also well suited for hybrid cloud applications. Some companies may wish to have a combination of on-premises and cloud systems, particularly if they are subject to stringent data security regulations. This is where the right partner with extensive experience of working in both on-premises and cloud security benefits companies working in hybrid clouds.
A better way to work in the cloud
Many companies may think that running their own cloud data server instead of using one of the handful of major cloud services providers will be more complex, more expensive and less secure. There may have been a time when this was true, but just as terminals made way for personal computers and personal computers were replaced by always-connected cloud systems, the world of data and security is changing. Today’s experts are changing how companies across the world are working with cloud technology.
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