Page 105 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

JUST O V ER THE HORIZON, PRIV ATE CL OUDS

If the intruder is still out there, he may find a way to insin-
uate himself again, but the watchman will be ready. The more
extreme advocates of security say that this process can be
pushed to a more logical conclusion, where the virtual ma-
chine is arbitrarily stopped, killed, and deleted from the system
every 30 minutes, whether it needs to be or not. A new one

spun up from a constantly checked master on a secure server
will be a known, clean entity. Such a practice would make it so
discouraging for a skilled hacker—who needs, say, 29.5 min-
utes to steal an ID, find a password, await authentication, and
then try to figure out a position from which to steal data—that
it would be a level of defense in depth that exceeds those de-
vised before. Such a watchman is just starting to appear from

start-up network security vendors; the hypervisor firewall with
intruder detection already exists as a leading-edge product.
Only the periodic kill-off mechanism still needs to be built
into virtual machine management.
As the desire for private clouds builds, the technology con-
vergence that has produced cloud computing will be given
new management tools and new security tools to perfect its
workings. We are at the beginning of that stage, not its end.
Guaranteeing the secure operation of virtual machines run-

ning in the private enterprise data center—and in the public
cloud—will enable the two sites to coordinate their opera-
tions. And that’s ultimately what the private cloud leads to: a
federated operation of private and public sites that further en-
hances the economies of scale captured in cloud computing.

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