Page 140 - Cloud Essentials
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confiscated that hosts both part of your legitimate service as well as an
illegal service.
The risk that network connectivity between consumers and providers is
interrupted or impaired.
Another item to consider is fate sharing; one malevolent cloud customer
could misuse the cloud infrastructure (for example, sending spam email),
which could result in a cloud provider network (which might include your
organization) being blacklisted. Assuming your organization uses hosted
email, the result would be legitimate mail from within your organization not
reaching its destination—a serious impediment.
Service Level Agreement
Services rendered by cloud providers are accompanied by an SLA.
Important components of an SLA are a description of the functionality
offered, for example, e-mail service; the uptime that is guaranteed, for
example, 99.5 percent; the speed with which the service operates, for
example, web pages load within two seconds and email is delivered within
two minutes; and a financial paragraph that explains the cost structure and
penalties. Cloud SLAs might include clauses related to where data will be
physically stored and replicated or perhaps which disaster recovery
procedures will be followed.
Legal Implications A service provider executes a number of processes on
behalf of the customer, such as accepting logins from users. It might actually
also handle identity provisioning. Legal uncertainties can arise around
accountability for these processes. Suppose that somebody gains access to
the service, without having the right to do so. Who is responsible for any
resulting damages? Resolving these issues requires a mixture of technical
measures, appropriate auditing and logging, and contractual agreements.
Licensing With cloud services, traditional licensing models can fail
because they are tied to a quantitative measure that is no longer relevant or
even desirable. Often software would have license costs that recurred on a
yearly basis tied to the number of CPUs that were installed. When servers
are elastically commissioned and decommissioned on an hourly basis, this
becomes inconvenient. In recent times, IaaS providers have worked with
vendors to tie the licensing cost to metrics that are more practical. For
example, the Microsoft Server 2012 operating system has a Datacenter
edition that allows an unlimited number of licensed virtual machines running
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