The 6 layers of the Cloud Computing Stack

NPR on Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 29, 2008

You know it’s important when NPR covers it !! On the “All Things Consider” radio show, NPR took a look into cloud computing. I’m not sure if Computing In The…

Sun Federal Cloud Computing eBook

By G C Network | August 28, 2008

Sun Federal now has it’s ebook on cloud computing available for all. The website doesn’t really offer any new information, but it does highlight how Sun Federal is targeting the…

Amazon Elastic Block Store

By G C Network | August 27, 2008

Last week, with their announcement of Elastic Block Store, Amazon has made enterprise class storage in the cloud a reality. According to Dion Hinchcliffe of Ziff Davis,”Elastic Block Store finally…

HP CTO On the Future

By G C Network | August 26, 2008

In a recent Web Guild article, Shane Robinson, Chief Strategy & Technology Office for HP outilined his belief that we are in the early stages of a major shift. As…

Google serves as first line of defense during Russia’s invasion of Georgia (A plug for the cloud)

By G C Network | August 25, 2008

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, “As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google. In…

Apptis and Servervault announce Fedcloud

By G C Network | August 22, 2008

On August 18th, Apptis announced a partnership with ServerVault to offer a trusted cloud computing environment to federal agencies. Called Fedcloud they are offering a federally compliant, on-demand infrastructure that…

SOA-R Educational Series Schedule Changes

By G C Network | August 21, 2008

Since launching the SOA-R series back in July, cloud computing has become a hot topic among national security professionals. Evidence of this high level of interest is obvious from the…

Comments from Mr. Robert Carey, DON CIO and Army COS General George W. Casey, Jr

By G C Network | August 20, 2008

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to listen to both Mr. Robert Carey, CIO, Department of the Navy, and General George W. Casey, Jr., Chief…

Akamai at SOA-R Session

By G C Network | August 19, 2008

Had another very enlightening SOA-R session last week. Of particular note to me was Akamai’s vision of cloud computing. As presented by Fran Trently, Sr. Director Public Sector, Akamai is…

Six Benefits of Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 18, 2008

A Public CIO magazine article, to be published later this fall, will highlight six main benefits of cloud computing. Reduced Cost Increased Storage Highly Automated Flexibility More Mobility Allows IT…

From Sam Johnston’s Taxonomy post

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G C Network

2 Comments

  1. Randall on October 7, 2008 at 10:35 am

    You don’t mention where security fits in this stack. I know security is important at every level and it is there at every level now, but really there should be a single source of secure control of access to resources.

    That’s something big we need to work out. How can I have one account, the account I use to log into my cloud application and I can use that application with any other layer of stack or in combination with them without having to know that amazon requires these credentials and nirvanix requires another set.

    The end user shouldn’t care about these things, it should be handled at the platform level, but from my perspective there is no robust security model for the cloud, not yet.

    Any ideas what we might see fill this gap?



  2. Sam Johnston on March 4, 2009 at 10:52 pm

    Actually security is something that I do think about as a CISSP, but having looked at the various solutions it was clear that they permiated every layer of the stack. The resources themselves are secured by various mechanisms (AWS request signing for example) and from the user point of view you have OpenID and OAuth at the services layer. Even on the clients we don’t want cloud apps interfering with each other and you can see that browsers like chrome go to great lengths to prevent this.

    So yes it’s a valid point, but not one that wasn’t well considered.

    Cheers,

    Sam