It’s not surprising to me that with all the excitement about Cloud Computing and the constant press attention to Cloud and its benefits, every vendor is trying to rise to the top by claiming to be the most innovative Cloud provider or claiming many years of Cloud experience.
By not defining Cloud clearly or by mislabeling every service as Cloud, vendors are confusing customers.
I’ve been working on a future-oriented economic growth program with the US Conference of Mayors and we have identified Chattanooga as a location to demonstrate some of these ideas because it has, by far, the largest and fastest deployment of fiber in any metro area in the US — enabling every home and other building to have a gigabit connection.
I live in California where we are facing severe challenges in our economy and funding public services ranging from teachers in the classroom to courts and correctional institutions. In San Francisco, cuts to 25 courtrooms and 40% of staff are underway to address the $13.75 million budget gap. Longer lines for citizen services and delays up to 5 years for cases coming to trial are expected.
Of course, the economy is not only challenging governments at the state and local level but nationally and internationally as well.
Isn’t it time we use technology to help cut costs and deliver services that are more efficient?
A great example is the City of San Antonio Texas sharing video across public safety and justice systems.
Last week I presented and participated at the The Open Group Forum in Austin, TX. It was a great event, with insights into Enterprise Architecture, Business Architecture and Emerging Architectures. There were several breakout tracks in the Forum, including, the most popular -- Cloud Architectures Track. The sessions ranged from connecting architecture frameworks (TOGAF) to Cloud Architectures, to Cloud Architectures development. My session was on “Architecture & Considerations for IaaS Clouds”. This session was more focused on technology aspects of the Cloud Architecture. Also, it could be applied to either an enterprise private cloud or a service provider cloud settings. Just to level set everyone in the audience, I started out with a taxonomy and reference architecture (RA) review. I utilized both NIST’s published and a simplified version of Cisco Cloud RA. The Cisco RA review was the case in point for this session, where Infrastructure, Service orchestration, Delivery/Management and consumer layers were discussed.
The former Director of Central Intelligence Directives 6/3 established specific protection levels based on an information system’s assessed level of concern. In 2008 The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) began releasing Intelligence Community Directives (ICD) that were to eventually supersede the DCID. I’m no longer an active practitioner of Certification and Accreditation so it is unclear to me whether the ICD 500 series has actually superseded or cancelled the DCID 6/3. From my interactions over the past 18 months I’m thinking that the DCID 6/3 is still alive combined with specific ICD 500 guidance and 800-53. Regardless, in my opinion the DCID 6/3 offers some great legacy guidance for multi-tenant clouds.
