Page 180 - 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

is used, it’s essential that the operations of this central piece
of software be protected through ongoing research and con-
stant upgrade of what its firewall/intruder protection system
can do.
In addition to IaaS, cloud computing is sometimes deliv-
ered in the pattern known as platform as a service, or PaaS.

The platform is the computer server and services infrastruc-
ture, similar to Amazon’s, but the customer is also offered
additional tools and building blocks to extend an application
on the cloud platform or build a new one to run on the plat-
form. While an AMI exists on its own, a platform application
might get the services of an enterprise service bus that can au-
tomatically link it to other applications. It would also gain serv-

ices from integration software that can convert data from one
source into the format required by another.
The Cloud Security Alliance warns, however, that platform
extensions and building blocks for applications mean that the
applications must take a greater share of responsibility for se-
curity in the cloud environment than they would in an enter-
prise environment. Existing Web applications “have a rich body
of knowledge about common types of vulnerabilities and their
mitigation. Similar knowledge for platform-as-a-service envi-

ronments must still be developed,” it warns.
The third common form of cloud computing is software
as a service, or SaaS, with Salesforce.com and its popular cus-
tomer relationship management (CRM) application being a
leader in this space. Without Salesforce.com’s ability to estab-
lish the concept of the multitenant application—that is, soft-
ware running as a service with thousands of simultaneous

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