Cloud Computing and the Lure of Hosted Solutions Lathrop & Gage LLP Full service law firm 300 attorneys / 600 total personnel 12 national offices 1
What is Cloud Computing? From Wikipedia: a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. What is Cloud Computing? Also from Wikipedia: clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. More simply: Application portability Separation of application from infrastructure (which thereby enables pooled/shared resources) 2
What is Cloud Computing? Typical Centralized Network Design 3
Cloud Architecture What Isn t Said About Cloud Computing? Cloud Computing Doesn t Always Mean: Security (do you know where your data is?) Availability (even Google has had big outages) High performance (will you get guaranteed metrics?) Cheaper (could end-up costing more) Public/hosted see hybrid solutions Ensure compliance HIPAA/SOX/EU Privacy laws? Can you perform that SAS 70 audit in the cloud? Where does your data reside and what s applicable? Provider may have to turn-over business data that might not have to be turned-over if located in a private cloud Responsibility for violations or liability for data breach? 4
Don t Believe the Hype The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can t think of anything that isn t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women s fashion. Maybe I m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It s complete gibberish. It s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? Cloud... I mean, cloud is water vapor...but it s not water vapor, it s just a computer connected to a network! What are you talking about? What do you think Google runs on? It s databases and operating systems and memory and processors! --- Larry Ellison (CEO Oracle) Buzzword Bingo Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Software as a Service (SaaS) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Hosted Solutions VMDK VHD Hybrid clouds (public/private) Cloud Bursting Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) 5
How Can You Leverage Cloud Computing? Rethink your DR plan Consider specific components and how to adapt them Email Emergency Communications Storage Hot/Warm site Bursting Consider a public/private hybrid Leverage the best of both Ensure entrance/exit strategy Potential other benefits Faster deployments Fewer in-house staff needed? Public/Private Hybrid Cloud Private cloud Virtualized servers, SAN Internal chargeback (on the horizon) All the benefits of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS with the security of maintaining it on premises Public cloud Ability to move between private and public as needed for DR or maintenance purposes Still able to control charge-back Bursting on demand Still need to consider all the issues 6
3/24/2010 Public/Private Cloud Current Network Design 7
You Need to be Prepared! If cloud relies on the Internet, you d better have solid connectivity Redundant connections on the WAN and via ISPs Fat connections (big enough to support everything) Fast connections (if performance is sluggish, you ll hear it) Don t be afraid to negotiate and don t get locked-in Consider Interoperability Investigate the provider Financial Stability Their DR plan and redundancy You need an exit strategy Any data that goes in may need to come out due to cost, security, stability of vendor Cloud Computing - Virtualization Why? Server in a file (abstracts software from hardware) Servers can share hardware (pooled resources) Quicker to bring-up and restart Requires less hardware Enables portability (sort-of) How? Microsoft Hyper-V VHDs VMWare ESX VMDKs Citrix/Xen/other options 8
SaaS E-mail Continuity Options Postini Spool email add simple archiving for another $4/month MessageOne $50/box/year for about 30 days of mail Replication with full fail-over Mimecast $6/box/month Postini + MessageOne, and then some SaaS E-mail Options (Fully Hosted) Google Mail Microsoft Hosted Exchange Simple Web Hosting $6/box/month for Exchange accounts Before you go all in, think about what else you have in your environment that might be affected (PDAs, internal servers that require SMTP relays, encryption, etc.) 9
Other Applications Google Apps, Zoho Office, MS Office CRM Apps MySAP, Workday Salesforce.com NetDocuments (doc management) Hosted SharePoint Webfiltering (Postini, Websense, Your ISP?) Managed firewalls (most ISPs offer this) DNS you re probably already doing this Storage Why? Defined cost per storage (do you really know what it costs internally now?) can be billed-back Storage is cheap Add space on-the-fly Ideal for short-term needs Who? Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) Microsoft Windows Live SkyDrive 3Tera Rackspace Plenty of others 10
Computing Why? Increase workloads on the fly ideal for temp uses Avoid the cost of a completely replicated co-lo Cheap (as little as $0.40/hr) Great for developers Who? Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Microsoft Azure (and SQL Azure, and AppFabric) 3Tera (AppLogic) AppNexus GoGrid Various other API providers (Yahoo, Google, etc.) Telephony Virtual DIDs via SIP trunking Verizon Business Global Crossing other Telcos/ISPs? Fully-Hosted PBX Cypress RingCentral VirtualPBX Consumer grade Grand Central (now Google Voice) Vonage, Skype, MagicJack, T-Mobile 11
Questions? Ben Weinberger, CIO bweinberger@lathropgage.com 816-292-2000 12