Enterprise Cloud Security: How To Have Success in the Clouds

– K. Scott Morrison, CTO & Chief Architect with LAYER 7 TECHNOLOGIES (www.layer7tech.com), says:

To be successful in the cloud, you need to rethink many traditional aspects of application architecture. This is demonstrated in area of architecture other than security. Amazon services illustrate this effect well. To get massively scalable databases, you can’t use conventional RDBMS; instead you need to use something like SimpleDB, which is designed from the ground up to be cloud-centric and scalable on a unprecedented scale. But there are things you must give up to get this, like complex joins. If you can fit this into your thinking—and for a large number of Web apps, the “limitations” can be accommodated, then you can reap the rewards. It’s a rethink of architecture, but the benefits of doing so are enormous. The architects who build massively scalable web apps like Google, Amazon.com (bookstore, not web services), Salesforce.com, etc understand this and leverage the opportunity. It is the same thing with security.