How Cloud Services are Spurring Innovation

In building a software product or application, a major challenge was to gain access to the tools and resources to build applications as personal projects, games, to address community needs, etc. Cloud service providers, such as Salesforce’s Heroku, provides a free tier service with enough computational power to effectively test the product with over a couple hundred users, and can be configured for basic security protection (such as SSL certificates) within minutes. There are a variety of complex features that are made simple for users to configure that helps eliminate the cost and time for dedicated maintenance team (Salesforce). There are many cloud service providers such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon with very competitive pricing and robust features providing a quick reliable solution to deploy your application. (Wharton, UPenn)

I love this concept of cloud computing as it affects my daily life and activities significantly. As a computer science student who loves building consumer facing products, I was able to experiment with different software based solutions and deploy that quickly without or at low cost to a cloud service provider, generally Heroku, but often Azure or AWS depending on the required features. I have been able to give demos and presentations without worrying about the maintenance of databases or the uptime of the application. As a student and consumer, I have been able to store my files on Google/One Drive or my projects on Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage. All my files were securely accessible on different devices, such as mobile, PC or Mac making it very easy for me to work while traveling or at different locations.

California’s Deputy CIO, Chris Cruz explained a few reasons why few industries avoid migrating directly to cloud, and keep their own infrastructure despite the high costs. The major reason was Data Control and Security. When you have extremely sensitive information to handle, such as patient data or banking information, you cannot risk access to that data by the corporate cloud providers. This is among the major barriers to adoption of the corporate cloud despite the reliability, cost, flexibility and convenience it provides. Among the notable moves however, Mr. Cruz mentioned that for multiple agencies within the state of California that handle less sensitive data (according their internal classifications) will be migrating to corporate cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. This would be a major leap towards innovation by government for their internal technology stack.

In terms of cloud services adoption, there has been a widespread problem about being locked to the service provider by consumption of their internal APIs (a way to use advanced features provided by cloud service providers within your product/software). Most cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform requires using their APIs for data storage (aka “Blobs”) , while Microsoft has already announced a solution for a particular type of applications—applications that are configured with Mongo Database (MongoDB) wherein these applications will be automatically configured with Microsoft’s Cosmos DB Service. Soon, we should be able to have interoperability among multiple Cloud service providers, helping mitigate risks.

Cloud Services are contributing in building an innovative corporate, consumer and developer environment. How can Cloud Providers address the challenge of Data Security? Can we have pieces of an application deployed on multiple cloud services?

Sources:

1. https://www.heroku.com/free
2. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/blog/2015/11/why-move-to-the-cloud-10-benefits-of-cloud-computing.html
3. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-cfo-imperative-leveraging-the-cloud-for-business-innovation-and-growth/
4. Presentation by Deputy CIO of California, Chris Cruz on Friday, June 30th 2017.
5. https://www.google.com/drive/using-drive/
6. https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/business/
7. http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html
8. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-introduction
9. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/blobstore/
10. https://cloud.google.com
11. http://web.stanford.edu/class/msande238/guests.html (and restricted class slides)
12. http://techblog.ca.gov/tag/chris-cruz/

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