The Park Paradigm - Latest Comments in Urban myths in clouds.

Re: Urban myths in clouds.

parkparadigm — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:47:25 -0000

Thanks Brennan and absolutely great point. Do you know of anyone or any start-up who's business model is to be the AWS for financial services? (or the Radianz for clouds?)

Re: Urban myths in clouds.

Brennan Carley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:25:01 -0000

While I agree with 99% of this, it is worth looking at the question"does your organization know how to run a more secure data centre than Amazon or Google?" Keep in mind that the business that Amazon and Google are in doesn't necessarily have the same business requirements (for security, or reliability or latency) that a financial services firm may need. In particular, while Amazon "hardens" the servers that keep critical financial information, they have less incentive to harden the servers that they offer to clients for cloud computing.

In a prior life I co-founded Radianz (now BT Radianz) because of two simple observations:
1 - Computing was moving into the cloud, financial markets were becoming increasingly electronically interconnected, and the running of IT infrastructure was not truly a core competency of financial services firms.
2 - The generic IT infrastructure providers (IBM, AT&T, BT, or these days Google or others) either don't "get" or more importantly don't have business models that are optimized to serve the needs of the financial markets.

The conclusion then was, and I believe remains, that there is a valuable business opportunity to provide cloud base infrastructure and services that are built for the financial markets.

So your overall premise is 100% correct, it may just be that Google and Amazon, as highly competent as they are, aren't the right companies to provide these services to financial markets.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have no ties to Radianz any more, other than personal friendships to the handful of people left after the acquisition by BT.)

Re: Urban myths in clouds.

parkparadigm — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:52:01 -0000

Love it. Great story, thanks!

Re: Urban myths in clouds.

Mark — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:15:14 -0000

A friend at ANZ bank was slack jawed when I pointed out that while signing into a 'highly-secure' colocation facility I was able to hear the Deutsche Bank guys in front of me sign in.... I new the floor they were on and by following them, the room their servers were in. It would have taken a little more gumption and a straight face to follow them into the room, as an air-conditioning unit technician, and see the rack(s) they were using. All that info by hanging out in the lobby and all for the price of renting a 1U server in that facility :)
I then asked him what chances he thought he could find out the location of the AMI I just launched... this is esp case if, as it seems is the case that us-east1a is not always the same location. He now under stood why I had started laughing so much when he said ANZ would not entrust their computing infrastructure to a third party because it wasn't secure. Hilarious.

Re: Urban myths in clouds.

Andy — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:48:05 -0000

Not sure what the impact to VPN cubed will be, but the management, deployment of data and security of the private/public clouds for a business may just have a new java poster child in:
http://blog.springsource.co...

And since SpringSource now has the clout of VMware on its side, thats one clouty cloud.