Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

Fifth in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing.

Reprise

In “The Cloud”, we identified five cloud infrastructure priorities:

• Connect
• Secure
• Manage
• Develop
• Collaborate

We’ve elaborated about Connect, Develop, and Secure and here we will talk about Collaborating in the Cloud.

Modern Collaboration

I’ve previously discussed the revolutionary changes in collaboration that have arisen from social networking. There are two simultaneous changes in support of each other.

• The nature of collaboration. Modes of interaction between people and modes of broadcasting information are changing. This is impactful in personal, business, and political dimensions. A glance at the impact of Twitter—to true-up reporting of events in Iran confirms this.
• The technology to support collaboration is changing. In “Acquisitioin of SiteScape” we discussed the mechanisms to support the change in the nature of collaboration.

Collaboration in the Cloud

As the twin changes—nature of collaboration and technology to support it—bootstrap each other, we move to the next breakthrough technology of cloud computing. A cloud computing collaboration infrastructure increases the facilities for ad hoc teams of people to work together in an informal, opportunistic fashion. These people are distributed across enterprises and may fuse enterprise needs with personal needs. Key new properties of an infrastructure to collaborate in the cloud include:

• Collaboration at “chat speed”. Teams can instantly form or break-up. It is easy for individuals to join or depart team collaborations and be apprised of the history of communications of this team. Many are calling this the real-time web.
• Unification. A difficulty with today’s collaboration techniques is that there are too many of them. Cloud based collaboration can make this worse by adding more modes. Cloud communication infrastructure must create a unified dashboard for the multiple approaches to collaboration.
• Real-time awareness. Cloud computing’s instant-on nature will raise the awareness of what others are doing to a new level. Instead of a static view of whether individuals are on-line we create a dynamic view of the “properties” of what groups are doing.
• Security. We must find a way to secure the collaboration—when it is used for business needs, without sacrificing the ease-of-use required for personal or consumer needs.

Novell Teaming

Novell has been investing in collaboration technology. Our strategy is to provide the infrastructure for computing and collaboration for our customers. With that in mind, we were gratified last week when Forrester recognized Novell as having a “solid position as a collaborative platform vendor” as a consequence of our Novell Teaming product.

The Next Step—the Integrated Cockpit

Building on our success in Teaming, we will take collaboration to the next level for the cloud. In “Innovation Culture” I mentioned our breakout move initiative that identifies revolutions in our industry and innovative solutions to address these revolutions. One project that we funded was the Cockpit project. This provides an integrated “cockpit” for users to view all of their collaboration paradigms. It has the cloud computing support mentioned above: collaboration at chat speed and real-time awareness with security. In this way, it supports ad hoc collaboration as never before. It has other outstanding capabilities such as social message flow and co-editing; which we will elaborate on as the project reaches greater degrees of maturity.

Fourth in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing.

Recent Events

The summer has seen numerous announcements with the proof points of our cloud infrastructure contributions. These announcements are transformative. They are not merely new products. They address issues that the industry has not totally addressed, with innovative solutions.

Last week was especially exciting. As foreshadowed in Software Appliances and Cloud Computing we launched SUSE Studio a key tool in our overall appliance program and in developing for the cloud. The press reaction was breathtaking with some saying that this was Novell’s most important announcement in decades.

Also last week we provided our cloud security demo at the Burton conference. More about that below.

The previous week saw Microsoft releasing 20,000 lines of GPL code to the Linux kernel. Interesting times.

Reprise

In mid-June, we identified five cloud infrastructure priorities:

• Connect
• Secure
• Manage
• Develop
• Collaborate

We’ve elaborated about Connect and Develop and here we will talk about Securing the Cloud.

Cloud Security

Many studies have documented that enterprises are concerned about cloud computing security.

This is not surprising. Many events have heightened concerns about security. Information leakage, viruses, and lost laptops are examples of security lapses. Cloud computing exacerbates concerns. Data and applications are placed outside of the enterprise, outside the firewall, and outside the adminstrative domain of the IT organization.

The security fears are dramatic enough. Sometimes, the fix is worse than the fear. A cloud computing vendor might propose a new security model to assure wary users that their data is safe. However, even if this new model is theoretically secure—it does not immediately address the practical problem. The IT organization must incorporate the model deeply enough to be secure. They must be able to explain it to survive a corporate audit about data protection. After the IT organization appreciates the security of the new model there is complexity to introduce the new model and security holes that arise from lack of training or misuse

Annexation

With so many barriers the best way to secure the cloud is to use existing security models. The IT organization should use the same security and access control technology for the cloud as they use in the enterprise. The interfaces must be the same. The user model must be the same. If passwords are used the actual password must be the same.

We call this idea annexation of the cloud. In this model we provide transparency in usage and security model so that the IT organization does not use a new access control paradigm. Rather, they feel that the cloud has become an extended part of their enterprise.

Novell Cloud Security Service

This is the essence of the Novell cloud security service that we demonstrated together with PivotLink at the Burton conference last week. By federating a SaaS vendor’s access control mechanism with existing enterprise mechanisms we provide cloud security within the existing model of an enterprise.

Another key piece of the cloud infrastructure provided by Novell!

Log Management

Also last week, we announced our Sentinel Log Management product. This has immediate value to today’s enterprises as they struggle with masses of data that need to be processed to assure compliance. With respect to cloud computing, we can only imagine that these compliance needs will become more demanding, data sources more disparate, and organization of this data more critical. Sentinel Log Management is focused on today’s compliance needs but this asset will also provide value to secure the cloud.