siliconindia | | April 20158opinionin myChanging Business RequirementsMilind Karnik, SVP-Global Engineering, QLogic Corporation (NASDAQ:QLGC)The key thing that we are seeing within the overall cloud infrastructure is that there is a dramatic trend to move towards commodity hardware. Infrastructure hardware is being commoditized and procurement managers for companies are looking at hyper scale data centers as their models for the cloud industry. The managers want to reduce complexity of different types of fabrics, servers and storage. However, we see simplification shaping the cloud industry. Everything is moving to a server-based architecture which is networked on an Ethernet fabric, and whatever is being built out of that is being built in a software-defined environment. Cloud companies are less interested in ultimate reliability of hardware, because applications are becoming fault tolerant. There is a tectonic shift in how infrastructure is being viewed. Instead of having the highest reliability and the best infrastructure, it's shifting to commodity with all the capabilities being provided in the application. The promise of cloud computing is enhancing premises with a service-oriented operational paradigm featuring high efficiency, elastic scalability with the ability to react to on-demand resource requirements in near real-time, fast and easy deployment of new applications, increasing responsiveness and agility of IT as a whole, and lower overall cost to the business. The cloud computing technologies have become viable options for organizations but it also introduces potential drawbacks and challenges that can make some organizations cautious about adopt-ing them. The technology that has been lacking in the cloud arena is security. Cloud infrastructure is providing a fantastic way to de-liver capability to enterprises, allowing them to shift Capex to Opex. Amazon's AWS and S3 are exclusive examples of pay-as-you-go pricing model. There is no up-front investment required. It is great for small companies to start up on, but when it comes to security, can one really trust that all the data will always be available. A series of question arises. What happens with a WAN failure? What happens if the access is lost to the Amazon cloud? Issues such as; business continu-ity, security, disaster proofing in the case of a total loss of external connectivity are equally perplexing for the IT managers. There are numerous security issues for cloud computing as it encompasses many technologies including networks, databases, oper-Milind Karnik
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