Cloud Security

One of the biggest misconceptions that companies new to the cloud deal with is the issue of trusting the cloud. This shows up in many different ways but dealing with security is a main one.

Security is very important to nearly all companies. Moving to the public cloud means taking my application that is safely behind my company’s firewall and putting it on a public cloud. The first time you consider doing this, it’ll seem scary. Can I trust the cloud to keep my data secure? Is my application safe from attack in such a public environment?

The short answer? Yes.

For the vast majority of companies, your company is probably safer in the hands of a public cloud provider than it is behind your own firewall. Why is that true? Because cloud service providers make a living on trust. They would not be in business if they could not keep their customer’s data secure.

Cloud providers invest heavily in building high-quality security teams that spend their time advancing the state of the art in security protocols and procedures. By putting your data in the hands of a reputable public cloud provider, you take advantage of the learnings and best practices created by the leaders in the security field. Unless your company has the same resources to invest in security as the cloud providers do, your company can benefit from these learnings in so many ways.

By using a public cloud provider and taking advantage of all the security offerings they provide, you can actually keep your applications and data safer in the public cloud than you can behind your own firewall.

Cloud Migration via Lift-n-Shift

Early in the process of adopting the cloud, many companies consider moving applications to the cloud by simply taking the application off of servers in their own data center and move them to servers they’ve created in the cloud.

This type of migration is often called “Lift-n-Shift”.

While lift-n-shift is a valid way to very quickly get your application out of your data center and into a cloud-based data center, it doesn’t do anything to make your application cloud friendly. It doesn’t do anything to take advantage of the native value and native characteristics of the cloud.

Yes, there are some benefits you can get from a lift-n-shift migration, including the ability to expand to additional data centers simply by launching servers in another region. But that is about where the benefits stop. In fact, the cloud can actually be worse at basic application hosting such as this than your own data centers are. Why? Cost.

The cloud can and does provide significant cost benefits for users that take advantage of the dynamic allocation capabilities of cloud resources. But it typically can’t compare in cost to the basic, static infrastructure provided by a non-cloud data center. When you use the dynamic capabilities of the cloud, you can save money. If you simply lift-n-shift, you typically don’t save money and often spend more.

Doing a lift-n-shift can cost your money, and cost your time, and not give you any of the benefits you were wanting with a cloud migration.

The Lure of Serverless

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the cloud, and the latest and greatest cloud service offerings often

seem like the solution to all your problems.

However, like any new technology, understanding how and where to apply the technology is critical to successfully using the technology.

This most certainly applies to the newest Function as a Service (FaaS) offerings by cloud providers, such as AWS Lambda, and Microsoft Azure Functions.

These offerings promise the ability to provide an execution environment for your software without the need for managing the servers they run on. This “serverless computing” offering is very attractive to companies that are wanting to use the cloud to reduce their infrastructure management costs. But, like all new technologies, FaaS offerings such as Lambda are good for some class of problems and they are not good for other class of problems.

Yet, I often hear statements from individuals such as “Lambda will solve my computing infrastructure problems” and “we’re moving all of our software to Lambda”.

To people thinking that FaaS offerings such as Lambda are a solution to all your problems, be careful. AWS Lambda and the equivalent offerings by other cloud providers give a huge advantage to certain class of computing environments, but they can be overused.

If they are force fit into solving problems they weren’t designed to solve, they actually can create more problems for you and your infrastructure management than they solve.

Use them as an important part of your application architecture, but don’t depend on them to solve all your computing problems. Use them only where they make sense.