Page 237 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

NEBULA: NASA'S STRATEGIC CL OUD

Many businesses would be happy to reach out to the digi-
tally oriented younger generation and find a means of achiev-
ing greater engagement with their customers of all ages. To
do so through an internal cloud in their own data center or
a public cloud such as GoGrid, Joyent, or Rackspace might
prove a cost-effective way of reaching the public. The use of

Nebula by geographically dispersed NASA and government
organizations is also a model for businesses.
At the same time, there is a major difference between
NASA and the business world. Nebula has been designed to
be more secure than many other government computing
sites. Because it has one shared architecture, imposing secu-
rity measures and keeping them up to date is easier than it is

in a data center with multiple operating systems or even mul-
tiple releases of the same operating system and other software.
This argument that a more uniform architecture can provide
greater security can be made on behalf of EC2 and other
cloud resources used by businesses.
In addition, the Nebula developers have been able to side-
step a common business security problem: how to control
customer-related data, transaction information, and other pri-
vate data. By design, NASA is putting in Nebula only informa-

tion that by definition is public information. Its goal is to
achieve greater transparency and sharing of the agency’s in-
formation through the cloud.
“The only information being stored on Nebula is rated as
publicly available data and is not currently intended to store
sensitive information. Nebula was created to enable NASA to
engage with the public more easily on the Web and to make

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