5 Keys to Successfully Building Enterprise Cloud Apps
Deploying enterprise cloud apps to public or remote cloud infrastructure provides a lot of useful benefits, but can be problematic for many organizations due to concerns over security and control. Once you are ready for the move from your warm and windowless data center to someone else’s warm and windowless data center, here are 5 keys to being successful.
1) Protect your data (part 1)
Cloud security is the number one issue with using public clouds. Many organizations are building applications that include personal information, confidential information, or intellectual property that needs to be protected. Help all the paranoids sleep better by building in security features from the start, even going to the point of overkill if necessary. Database encryption is a common way to protect data at rest, but also consider treating your cloud instances as single use servers. Remove all the keys and passwords from disk once your application is running and disable all unnecessary connections including ssh. Adopt a devops strategy that allows quick launches and centralized logging and management. If a server does stop responding or gets rebooted for some reason, just throw it away and get a new one. Taking a few extreme security measures will help you get more opportunities to utilize the true power of the cloud.
2) Protect your data (part 2)
Cloud technology does pose some new challenges. At this point, server failure rates can vary and the faster options include storage that does not persist across restarts or failures. Data loss is a real risk unless a high availability or replication strategy is adopted. There are also plenty of cloud based data solutions popping up, including Cloudant, Amazon RDS, and Rackspace MySQL Cloud, that can put the HA burden on someone else’s shoulders. Bottom line, losing data will kill a project fast. Keep it safe.
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