Since the Amazon cloud outage and the Sony highjack of its gaming platform the security and reliability have come under much scrutiny once again.
The EC2 platform which supported major applications such as Quora and Reddit were impacted as well as many corporate customers. The issue of Sony being hacked has caused a lot of B2C consumers to really question their internet web commerce transactions. Consumers have been forced to become very educated quickly about cloud computing and SaaS applications. This is especially true where customers have to use credit cards and other forms of electronic payment.
The corporate impact is still unfolding and organizations are still conducting their post mortem and re-examining their infrastructure and are even reconsidering IaaS, IaaS and SaaS options. This breach of security has caused a renewed interest in private clouds. The main issues for organizations are security, business continuity, threat detection and avoidance are all areas which have shown vulnerability to system attacks.
If a private organization has their own ecommerce cloud will consumers trust their brand of security more than a public infrastructure such as the Sony gaming platform, this is a question that consumers and organizations must consider when engaging in any type of internet payment transactions. As for corporations that relied on the Amazon EC2 cloud how long were they down for and was any of their data breached due to what I call “cloud worming”. This is an attack on a virtual partition that propagates through the data and hops over the virtual partition to other customers databases and then infects the server, network, platform and then infrastructure. Hackers are finding inventive ways to by-pass and infect data and operations not to mention theft of precious personal and corporate data. Once the data has been retrieved off the machines it can be used for malicious purposes such as identity theft, credit card fraud and even corporate espionage may be possible.
These outrages have caused organizations to be more diligent in their research as to when procuring new IT products, services and systems as now service level agreements, security, infrastructure, applications and business continuity have become of utmost importance which further complicates selecting any type of enterprise software. When looking for additional assistance in selecting enterprise software whether it is ERP or a pointed application solution, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS options are now more complicated than ever based on tenancy, private or public cloud and a variety of other choices that impact the security model and affect the ROI and your technology investment and the monthly cost of the subscription be it a cloud service.
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