Page 104 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

infrastructure around the concept of the private cloud. This is
an evolutionary, not revolutionary, process that will occur over
many years.
I can hear the voices saying, don’t go down the route of the
private cloud: it will destroy your security mechanisms; it will
drag down your performance in your most trusted systems; it

will lead to disarray. I think instead that those who can’t move
in this direction will find that they are increasingly at a com-
petitive disadvantage. Whether you’re ready for it or not,
cloud computing is coming to the rest of the world, and those
who don’t know how to adapt are going to find themselves in
the path of those who do and who are getting stronger.
The private data center will remain private, that necessary

place of isolation from the outside world where data is safe and
someone always knows where it is. The private cloud in that
data center is as much behind the firewall and able to imple-
ment defenses in depth as any other part of the data center.
The day will come when the virtual machines running on
x86 servers will have a defensive watchman guarding the hy-
pervisor, that new layer of software that is so close to all the op-
erations of the server. The watchman will know the patterns of
the server and will be looking for the specific things an intruder

might do that would vary those patterns, blowing the whistle
at the first untoward movement that it spots. In response, an
automated manager will halt the virtual machine’s processing,
register what point it was at with the business logic and the
data, then erase the virtual machine. A new virtual machine
will then be constructed and loaded with the application in-
structions and data and pick up where its predecessor left off.

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