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March 19, 2010Private vs. Public vs. Hybrid CloudsBy: Ahmar AbbasMy thoughts on Hybrid Clouds for Insurance companies in the Insurance Networking News.Cloud computing has been the darling of the technology press for the last several years. However most of the coverage has focused on what is now known as the “public cloud”.....Cloud computing has been the darling of the technology press for the last several years. However most of the coverage has focused on what is now known as the “public cloud”. The public cloud as the name implies is infrastructure, platform and software that are accessible by typically going outside of the secure firewalled areas of the enterprise IT environment. However, there has been substantial innovation to allow companies to build their own “private cloud” computing infrastructure within their security perimeter and with their own compute, storage and networking assets. Insurance companies should keep the two options in mind as the map out their plans to leverage resource optimization that comes with cloud computing. Amazon’s EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure are two popular public cloud offerings for infrastructure on the cloud. Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are software development platforms that are hosted in the cloud. These can be leveraged by insurance companies to build and host a set of applications for their distributed dealer/agent base. Cloud platforms enable rapid development of applications and remove the requirements for any upfront capital investment for infrastructure. Insurance companies can see improved concept of market times frames. Insurance companies along with financial companies have been leading adopters of technologies such as grid computing and utility computing which can be considered as the evolutionary step towards cloud computing. This was primarily driven by the need to insurance companies to conduct heavy computations of large data sets, calculating risk, running simulations and forecasting models. These requirements can now be met by utilizing both private clouds as well as public clouds. Private clouds can be constructed with ease by either purchasing private cloud solutions from vendors or deploying open source tools such as Eucalyptus. Whereas departmental grids of past primarily focused on sharing computational resources, private clouds can now deliver compute as well as storage and database resources in an optimized manner. An emerging model is the public-private cloud computing model also known as the hybrid cloud. Insurance companies can create a hybrid cloud which keeps certain tasks within the enterprise on a private cloud but leverage the public cloud for other tasks. The Cloud Security Alliance has been recently established to address some of the security issues that arise when applications and data gets put on the cloud. The alliance is issued its first guidance document that can serve as a good roadmap for insurance company IT leaders that are considering various cloud options. Link | 19 March 10 @ 11:28 | Discuss ( 0,0 comments ) | Views ( 3060 Views) Start the Discussion |
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