One of the merits of living in the Silicon Valley is being able to exchange ideas, meet the guys that make it happen and live the buzz (or buzz life). In the past year or so, the frequency of the small talks we have around services in the cloud has increased significantly. Take a look at TechCrunchIT and all you see is picture of clouds. Looking back a few years, I was part of a failed attempt to build Exchange as a service and backup as a service in 1998 (Publicom alumni, step up:-) so it was fun to read Rich Tehrani's article yesterday, about the hosted application market, pointing more to the database as a service or platform as a service or application as a service (PaaS, DaaS, AaaS or, in short *aaS) but unfortunately he wrote only few words regarding security.
As enterprises try to reduce their cost and align computing requirements with actual use and the need to cost-effectively provision database infrastructure to support real time usage, the new *aaS technology and market emerges. Googling for "database as a service" or "platform as a service" will bring many results. Some of the behemoths (Google, Amazon) as well as less established companies such as LongJump offer services that will allow you to leverage the benefits of database in the cloud.
Most offerings lack the same maturity level of security and activity monitoring that in house database deployment offers. The growing adoption of *aaS platforms still does not include many applications that store private data or sensitive information in the cloud. As the demand grows, organizations should pay attention to the level of security and auditing capabilities that they have from the "cloud."
As enterprises try to reduce their cost and align computing requirements with actual use and the need to cost-effectively provision database infrastructure to support real time usage, the new *aaS technology and market emerges. Googling for "database as a service" or "platform as a service" will bring many results. Some of the behemoths (Google, Amazon) as well as less established companies such as LongJump offer services that will allow you to leverage the benefits of database in the cloud.
Most offerings lack the same maturity level of security and activity monitoring that in house database deployment offers. The growing adoption of *aaS platforms still does not include many applications that store private data or sensitive information in the cloud. As the demand grows, organizations should pay attention to the level of security and auditing capabilities that they have from the "cloud."
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