Juggling with Various Manifestations of Cloud

The onus is placed upon the providers of cloud services that go way beyond anything we have seen before. All the norms of the server farm, such as internet switch, hub and hosting centre etc., apply re-triplicated power feeds with no break supplies; duplicated / triplicated equipment providing   short Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) times, and that is not all.

There is more to it! Companies such as Intel and Cisco are looking at energy demands and connectivity issues related to 50 - 25Bn things on line, and how we are going to realise scalable solutions using cloud. 

Cloud meets the future needs
Today the Internet amounts to 3 to 5 per cent of the energy consumption for the whole planet, which is increasing exponentially with the growth of the number of users.  Clearly this is untenable for a growing population, and the ecological need to connect everything if the energy demands grow exponentially. 

Cloud threats will continue to evolve, whilst the new degrees of freedom offered by cloud technologies are near infinite. 

Fortunately, it looks as though the cloud, or better, clouds, can meet our future needs as their energy demands grow at a far slower rate, but we still have to think and act differently. One has to ponder over a sustainable cloud model given the fact that cloud is becoming all pervasive.

How can we achieve sustainable cloud future?
Perhaps the best descriptor of a sustainable cloud future would be that of an endless Russian Doll, where each Doll is actually an individual cloud!  So, we have to imagine clouds on chip; card; shelf; rack; bay; floor; building; campus; town; city; region; country augmented by personal; vehicle; home and office clouds.  At each level, we have to go from today’s Watts to milliWatts(mW), and mW to μW, and μW to pW. Roughly speaking, we have to reduce energy demands at every level by 1000 fold to support 9Bn people and over 50bn things.

At the same time, we expect to demand more bandwidth and faster response times. Are all these possible? Physics says it is!   So, the realisation is almost a pure engineering problem as opposed to a science project. So, what we can say about data centres in the cloud, or indeed almost everything, in ‘clouds’ is that they will be multi-site, distributed and dynamic. In fact, the ultimate realisation will appear increasingly biological in form and connectivity, with activity dynamically distributed across the entire fabric. 

Security and Storage, the new arm of cloud
Perhaps the best example of this new ‘beating heart of connectivity and storage’ is exemplified by the emergence of a new regime for security and protection. Firewalls and malware protection are about to be engineered at a chip, card, shelf, rack, bay, room and site level. Our devices are also about to become really smarter security wise, and the essence of what is being designed is an ‘auto-immune system’ for the cloud. When a device, chip or whatever detects malware or any form of threat – it will move to isolate the identified cause. At the same time, it will broadcast warnings to every device, hub, switch and hosting centre – so that a raft of counter measures can be launched. 

In the same way the mobile world has seen the rise of the virtual operators, the cloud providers will also see the rise of the virtual provider, and they will add yet another layer of confounding complexity for attackers, and new degrees of simplicity for the legitimate users 

These may well include decoy and spoof sites, honey pots and url redirection/hopping, but the main focus will be on isolation and destruction with individual and local alerts rapidly going global. In addition to this, we will also have the concatenation of clouds compounding the complexity presented to any would be attacker.  

Cloud creates obstacles for potential ‘attackers’
To date the Internet has been a dream for the dark side embedded with one dominant chip set and OS, Office Suite, and a limited number of applications, device types, and switch/hub software. But that is rapidly being broken down by the number of mobile device types, more operating systems, and infinity of apps. The cloud (clouds) further ratchet up that diversity, and add seemingly endless complexity and obstacles to the potential attacker.

Cloud is evolutionary, it comes in several manifestations
This is all an evolutionary game – and the future of cloud is not clear. What we know for sure is: the threats are not going away, and they will continue to evolve, people remain the biggest threat, whilst the new degrees of freedom offered by cloud technologies are near infinite. In the same way the mobile world has seen the rise of the virtual operators, the cloud providers will also see the rise of the virtual provider, and they will add yet another layer of confounding complexity for attackers, and new degrees of simplicity for the legitimate users.

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