The 6 layers of the Cloud Computing Stack

Is Cloud Computing applicable in national security and law enforcement?

By G C Network | July 2, 2008

Late last week I asked the following question on linkedIn “Are Cloud Computing concepts applicable in secure national security and law enforcement arenas (i.e. Defense, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Justice)? If…

The size of Google’s Cloud

By G C Network | July 1, 2008

From The Information Factories by George Gilder of Wired Magazine “The facility in The Dalles is only the latest and most advanced of about two dozen Google data centers, which…

Yahoo (Finally!) Jumps Big Into Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 30, 2008

According to The Register , the Yahoo! technology organization led by CTO Ari Balogh will now work on “developing a world-class cloud computing and storage infrastructure; rewiring Yahoo! onto common…

InformationWeek Cloud Computing Newsletter

By G C Network | June 27, 2008

InformationWeek has started a Cloud Computing Newsletter. They will be providing news and insights on this “critical IT trend”. Cloud computing ranges from the software-as-a-service market to Web-based storage services…

Is Cloud Computing just a fad?

By G C Network | June 26, 2008

Last week I attended an IBM SOA event in Northern Virginia. While there, I was discussiing the merits of cloud computing with some interested attendees. Their key question was if…

Joint Warfighting Conference 08

By G C Network | June 25, 2008

Last week I attended the Joint Warfighting Conference 08 (JWC 08) in Virginia Beach, Va. There were approximately 5000 attendees representing military, industry, academia, and government, registered for this year’s…

IBM Opens Africa’s First “Cloud Computing” Center

By G C Network | June 24, 2008

…… Second Cloud Center in China “IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the opening of new “cloud computing” centers in South Africa and China. Cloud computing enables the delivery of personal…

Dataline launches SOA-R: Cloud Computing for National Security Applications

By G C Network | June 23, 2008

Last week, Dataline (my company), in collaboration with IBM, Google, Northrop Grumman, Cisco and Great-Circle Technologies, launched an initiative aimed at integrating an end-to-end solution for secure cloud computing. Called…

Cloud Computing Value

By G C Network | June 20, 2008

In The real value of Cloud Computing, ENKI hits on why cloud computing is disruptive. It’s the services stupid !! By separating enterprises from their servers and offering universal, secured,…

How Cloud Computing Works

By G C Network | June 19, 2008

Jonathan Strickland provides an excellent overview of cloud computing on the how stuff works website. Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

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