Mark Masterson. Enterprise Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Conference - Cloud Slam 2009.
Abstract. Enterprise cloud computing is a type of cloud computing that is suited to the specific requirements of existing companies, and allows them to leverage resources in the Cloud to provide economical ways of adding capacity to their existing environments. First, their existing data centre (or some portion of it) is virtualised. Once this is accomplished, capacity from external cloud providers can be added (and dropped) dynamically, using technologies like CohesiveFT's VPN-Cubed, allowing enterprises to use the cloud to elastically (and transparently) scale out to the cloud. And because all network traffic is securely encrypted, enterprises can effectively make use of public, cloud infrastructure as if it was part of their internal datacentre -- entirely behind the (virtual) firewall. Moreover, the same technology can be leveraged to allow the use of multiple, disparate cloud providers, effectively solving the 'eggs in one basket' problem. Different cloud providers can be leveraged to allow for failover redundancy, load balancing, even the leveraging of different providers on a dynamic basis, using metrics such as SLA compliance, or changes in cost. And an enterprise might want to do this not because it will reduce costs, or allow a switch from capital to operating expenditures (although both of those things might be true or not, depending on the context), but because it will increase their overall agility.

This talk will build on the blog post found here: http://www.jroller.com/MasterMark/entry/the_enterprise_cloud

It will further clarify a) the role of virtual appliances in solving key problems b) the role of software configuration management, in combination with virtual appliances, to meet challenges of GRC, and c) why simple, static VPN / IPSEC solutions will not scale to meet the challenges of enterprise cloud computing.

Video of the session: