Cloud Computing has become a significant technology trend and many experts expect that cloud computing will reshape information technology (IT).

 

According to Forrester’s recent survey of 2,803 IT decision-makers, improving Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) capabilities is the No. 1 priority for SMBs and the second highest priority for enterprises for the next 12 months.

The scope of BC/DR programs is growing also: mature programs address all sources of downtime — including mundane power outages and weather-related disruptions, not just rare, catastrophic disasters. Security and risk professionals should take advantage of this increased visibility as the economic recovery slowly thaws IT budgets to improve the BC/ DR’s organizational and process maturity for the long term.

The report “Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Are Top IT Priorities for 2010 and 2011” indicated that 32 % of enterprises and 36 % of SMBs plan to increase spending on business continuity by at least five percent. Only 11 % of enterprises and 8 % of SMBs plan to decrease their spending. These statistics indicate that businesses are looking for reliability.

The Cloud infrastructure represents a paradigm shift for BC/DR. Businesses are looking for cost-effective solutions for reliability, and a well-designed Cloud Computing architecture with multiple redundant sites makes it suitable for utilization in a comprehensive Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy.

In October of 2010 Aberdeen group surveyed over 100 organizations with formal Disaster Recovery programs to learn whether they used public Cloud storage and if so, what benefits were realized in their performance. Aberdeen  discovered that organizations that had moved at least part of their data storage to the Cloud recovered from downtime events almost 4 times faster than those with no formal Cloud storage program. In addition, users of Cloud storage met their Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) more often than those storing their data inhouse.

A Cloud-based BC/DR solution is a good fit for any business with a low tolerance for downtime and data loss but this does not guarantee that there are no service outages. For example, a rare and major outage of Amazon’ Cloud-based Web service in April took down a plethora of other online sites, including Reddit, HootSuite, Foursquare and Quora.

The main concerns of Cloud Computing are security and privacy issues, which have been further categorized to include sensitive data access, data segregation, bug exploitation, recovery, accountability, malicious insiders, management console security, account control, and multi-tenancy. Solutions to various Cloud security issues include greater use of cryptography, particularly public key infrastructure (PKI), use of multiple Cloud providers, standardization of APIs, improving virtual machines support and legal support.

The Egypt Cloud Forum organized Egypt Cloud Day to increase the awareness of Cloud Computing and related security issues. The Egypt Cloud Forum is the official affiliate to the Cloud Security Alliance, Egypt Chapter, with the focus area on “Cloud Vulnerabilities Identification and Virtualization Security”. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best-practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and to provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all
other forms of computing. The Cloud Security Alliance is led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners, corporations, associations and other key stakeholders.

About The Author

Mahmoud Tawfik,  

CEO of Fixed Solutions and Penetration testing Director at Cloud Security Alliance – Egypt Chapter.