Sun joins cloud computing crowd
Sun recently announced that they are entering the cloud computing business. They were short on details, but long on creating communities, OS virtualization, API’s, and being a better value than Amazon’s EC2 service.
It remains to see how much traction Sun will gain in the growing cloud computing services market. I’m very satisfied with Amazon’s service. Joyent and GoGrid are also great vendors.
Consultants, small businesses and startups have been quick to latch onto cloud computing. For them, it’s a big win. No data center to maintain, an on-demand scale-out infrastructure and pay for the resources that you actually use.
There are downsides to putting your data in the cloud. At the top of the list is security. Followed closely by data persistence, resource availability, backup and recovery.
A new issue that has cropped up lately is regulatory compliance. All cloud vendors are pretty mum about giving away details of their cloud infrastruce. So it makes it very difficult for large corporate enterprises to assert that what they put out in the cloud is secure and in compliance.
