As can be expected with that sort of customer base, France Telecom’s business services arm is highlighting global business continuity support as the main reason for choosing its IaaS over the likes of Amazon or Rackspace. As the company’s international cloud chief, Chris McKay, told me, configurability is also a selling point.

“There are no small, medium or large instances. You pay for what you use, but you don’t have to pay for steps in instances,” McKay said.

Regarding competition from other telcos, particularly others from Europe such as BT and Deutsche Telekom, he stressed the “industrialized” nature of Orange’s offering – “we provide a catalog for the customer which has granularity of managed services which the customer can choose, from the OS to middleware to applications” – and the fact that Orange manages its own cloud data centers around the world rather than turning to outsourcing in certain locations.

Orange already has around 500 customers for Flexible Computing, which allows both self-managed and fully managed usage. The platform is based on in-house technology, but McKay said Orange was also looking at “other avenues”.

“Right now we’re carrying out studies,” he said. “[We will try] possibly OpenStack and a few others for an internal cloud solution at France Telecom in the next four months, where we’re going to evaluate what the right direction is for the future.”

According to an Orange Business Services statement on the North American and Asian expansion, the company is on track to rake in €500 million ($644 million) in cloud revenues in 2015. It managed €113 million in 2012, which was a third up on the year before.

The big European telcos are certainly pushing hard when it comes to the cloud, and this will no doubt be a topic for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September.

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The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry.

The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick.

However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well.

Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems.

Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options.

Amazon is to McDonald’s as Google is to …

Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it.

Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape.

AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon.

What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it.

The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone.

Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale.

If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road.

Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef.

Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.

Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu.

VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there.

OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …”

Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food.

In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great.

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The corporate-focused service has already been up and running for a while in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Colombia, France, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which is how it got to that number-three spot.

BT Cloud Compute has been built in-house at the company’s Adastral Park R&D center, in collaboration with the likes of Cisco and Citrix. The service runs out of 45 data centers around the world, which is handy when dealing with various countries’ compliance requirements.

BT is particularly keen on talking up its resiliency and 99.95 percent “expected” service level, as well as the fact that customers can run their services across both BT’s public cloud facilities and their own private clouds and in-house infrastructure.

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ParElastic sits in between the application and the underlying database and lets developers scale without having to resort to complicated sharding or maybe even moving the database back in-house where they can run it on a bigger server. Architecturally, Founder and CEO Ken Rugg told me, ParElastic’s Database Virtualization Engine is similar to a parallel database system, although it functions more like middleware that manages multiple database instances as one and is designed for operational rather than analytic workloads.

Because it intelligently balances database load and distributed data across servers, ParElastic is ideal for multitenant situations where multiple users, applications or services are accessing the database simultaneously, Rugg added.

Now, anyone familiar with the next-generation database market might think they’ve heard this story before, and they kind of have. The NoSQL database movement rode into town on the promise of high scalability, and the NewSQL movement furthered that story by bringing scale-out performance to SQL. Some of these databases are even available as cloud services.

However, Rugg explained, there’s a big difference between these options and what ParElastic does. Namely, while NoSQL and NewSQL options require deploying an entirely new database and likely rewriting some application code, ParElastic’s software just overlays customers’ existing cloud databases. Rugg said about half of its early users are running standard MySQL versions on Amazon Web Services, while the rest are spread across cloud providers such as Rackspace, Joyent and LiquidWeb.

Some ParElastic users actually manage existing SQL services such as Amazon’s Relational Database Service and Google Cloud SQL. One even uses it to manage an in-house database environment. And technically, Rugg noted, ParElastic could manage cross-cloud database deployments but, because of the inherent latency hit that would entail, “we wouldn’t recommend that.”

However, he said, the biggest beneficiary of ParElastic aside from the company itself might well be AWS. It is by far the most widely used cloud in the world, but when users reach the limites of their single database instances, Amazon usually tells them to look into sharding or perhaps transitioning to DynamoDB. “None of those are really too friendly for Amazon keeping their customers moving forward in their cloud,” Rugg said.

Further, although certain cloud providers offer better CPU, IO or network performance than AWS does (Rugg cited Rackspace as being particularly strong on IO performance, for example, and ProfitBricks as looking promising on the network front), “Amazon is sort of the lowest common denominator in a number of ways,” Rugg explained. The economics and performance requirements vary from application to application, of course, but ParElastic could help stitch together a number of commodity AWS instances to provide suitable performance at a lower cost than might be possible using the biggest, fastest instances from other providers.

Having watched the cloud market unfold as it has, though, Rugg and ParElastic aren’t banking on AWS — which has a reputation for launching services that compete with startup ecosystem partners — as the future of the business. By supporting other cloud providers that are gaining acceptance (aside from the ones Rugg noted, Google has been impressing some with the performance of its Compute Engine service), ParElastic is in a pretty good position to handle whatever cloud-database market shifts might occur.

“Even if Amazon comes out and says ‘We’re going to replace you with something we built back in the lab,’ that puts us in a great position in terms of validating the market,” Rugg said.

ParElastic’s existing investors — Point Judith Capital,  CommonAngels and LaunchCapital — also participated in the Series A round, which brings the company’s total venture capital to $8.7 million.

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CloudSigma, which operates out of both Switzerland (Zurich) and the U.S. (Las Vegas), was one of a handful of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers that signed up last November for SolidFire’s all-SSD storage system. The result is now here: CloudSigma has ditched all its hard-disk drives and, as a result, it now feels confident enough to offer a service-level agreement (SLA) for performance, as well as uptime.

What’s more, despite the fact that solid-state storage costs about eight times as much as hard-disk, CloudSigma hasn’t changed its pricing – its SSD-based utility service costs $0.14 per GB per month, same as the HDD-based service did. Customers can also pick up the SSD storage service unbundled from CPU and RAM if they so choose.

HPC in the public cloud

According to CloudSigma COO Bernino Lind, the shift to SSD is a major help when it comes to handling high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as those of Helix Nebula users CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL):

“They want to go to opex instead of capex, but the problem is there is no-one really who does public infrastructure-as-a-service which works well enough for HPC. There is contention — variable performance on compute power and, even worse, really variable performance on IOPS [Input/Output Operations Per Second]. When you have a lot of I/O operations, then you get all over the spectrum from having a couple of hundred to having 1,000 and it just goes up and down. It means that, once you run a large big data setup, you get iowaits and your entire stack normally just stops and waits.”

Lind pointed out that, while aggregated spinning-disk setups will only allow up to 10,000 IOPS, one SSD will allow 100,000-1.5 million IOPS. That mitigates that particular contention problem. “There should be a law that public IaaS shouldn’t run on magnetic disks,” he said. “The customer buys something that works sometimes and doesn’t work other times – it shouldn’t be possible to sell something that has that as a quality.”

CloudSigma has also resolved another contention point around RAM, Lind claimed:

“A modern CPU can ask for a lot of data because it’s fast and efficient, so it is possible to saturate and make contention on your memory bus. That has been solved with NUMA topology, which is like a multiplexer to get access to memory banks. You get asynchronous access, which means you don’t have contention on accessing the RAM.

“However, public cloud service providers turn this off so the actual instance doesn’t have access to NUMA. We figured out a way to pass on the NUMA topology so, when you run really extensive compute jobs, you won’t hit a kind of contention when you want access to RAM. This is really important for big data workloads.”

In-house stack

Speaking of things that public cloud providers tend to turn off, CloudSigma’s stack – apart from the underlying KVM hypervisor, everything was written in-house – makes it possible to access all the instruction set goodies that are built into modern processors, such as the AES encryption instruction set.

Public clouds may run on a variety of physical hosts that encompass a range of CPU generations, only some of which will have certain instruction sets hard-coded onto the silicon. Providers will often turn off these instruction sets to make their platform homogeneous, but that means losing out on the performance benefits offered by hard-coding. According to Lind, CloudSigma’s stack allows a heterogeneous cloud based on allocation pools – say, one of older Intel chips and another of newer AMD 6380 chips – that customers can choose according to their performance needs.

What does all this mean in practice? Lind cited the example of augmented-reality gaming outfit Ogmento, which recently used CloudSigma’s all-SSD setup to power a mobile, location-based version of a popular title. “They [said] all their I/O-heavy stuff, databases and so on, saw a x8-x12 performance increase,” he noted. “Their entire stack saw a x2-x4 performance increase. That means they need to use less compute power in order to run their system.”

With the budgetary constraints faced by European scientists these days, it’s not hard to see how that same kind of effect could make a real difference in more serious applications too.

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A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010 (subscription req’d), entitled “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of “where are they now.” Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here’s what has happened to the private companies and startups.

1. Abiquo: Abiquo has a new CEO, a tight partnership with NEC around selling to service providers and appears focused on the European market. The company raised about $14 million in 2010, but hasn’t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.
2. Appistry: Appistry made a huge shift in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications in areas such as life sciences, defense and financial services. Its biggest area of focus is genomics, where it is even developing new methods for analyzing genomes.
3. CA: CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010 — Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them — but it has been essentially silent since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.
4. Cloud.com: Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.
5. Elastra: Elastra is no more.
6. Enomaly: Enomaly’s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.
7. Eucalyptus Systems: If you ask CEO Marten Mickos, everything is great with Eucalyptus, and its whopping $55.5 million in venture capital (including a $30 million round in April 2012) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they’ll likely tell a different story.
8. GigaSpaces: GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term “private cloud.” It has always been much more about its in-memory data grid tech and apps that need dynamic scalability, although it does now offer a Platform-as-a-Service product that’s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.
9. Joyent: Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company — which has raised an incredible $115 million — is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings and has landed some big-name users.
10. Librato: Librato looks to have abandoned its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff — sensors, server use, whatever.  It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.
11. LongJump: In hindsight, LongJump’s business was not actually a great fit for that 2010 report, and its business appears about the same: you build apps in a user-friendly setting and they can run on LongJump’s infrastructure or your own.
12. Morphlabs: Morphlabs is the master of pivots, although it’s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform called mCloud Osmium in February.
13. Nimbula: Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an “acquihire” situation, although neither company will comment on the details.
14. Platform Computing: IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011 and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that’s a bad thing — Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I’d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.
15. Virtustream: Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010 (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It’s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers’ data centers.
16. Voxel: Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million by managed hosting provider Internap in January 2012.

OpenStack is what happened to the private cloud market and forced so many acquisitions, pivots and even one closure. Users, investors and everyone, really, were waiting for some promise of cloud interoperability and portability (aka something other than Amazon, VMware or Microsoft) and OpenStack delivered it. Further, for the service provider community — which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception — OpenStack provided a relatively engineering-free path to public cloud offerings (compared with building their own from scratch, that is) without fear of being at the mercy of a startup that might fold tomorrow and take its core technology with it.

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward “private cloud” in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We’ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack to some degree — Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game thanks to OpenStack.

For buyers, a large, well-heeled and deep-pocketed community has to be more appealing than a disparate collection of startups all doing their own thing.

L to R: Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Chris Kemp of Nebula (an OpenStack startup) and Sameer Dholakia of Citrix at Structure 2012.
(c) Pinar Ozger

Who’s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services — all companies with their own intellectual property, huge user bases and lots of money to back their visions. They all also have strong public cloud connections (some, obviously, stronger than others).

The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They’ve been big on engineering, won major customers early on and raised a lot of money to help them maintain through any tough times. All but Cloud.com, now part of Citrix, have a very prominent public cloud component, too — which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment — but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.

All of the aforementioned companies are/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we’re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry. Providers that weren’t part of that community are jumping on board, and it’s just a few established holdovers that look like they’ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry’s coattails.

Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You’re either really early and really good, or you wait for an open source project — OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. — and try to build on that. There’s following fast, and there’s following smart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka.

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The first two data centers are in London and Helsinki, and more are planned for Chicago towards the middle of the year, then Las Vegas and Singapore. A spin-off of sorts from the established Finnish hosting firm Sigmatic, UpCloud claims to have 100 percent homegrown virtualization tech. According to general manager Antti Vilpponen, this keeps costs low and services flexible:

“Our offering is truly scaleable and flexible – we’re not giving any predetermined set of instances. You can freely choose the amount of CPUs, memory and storage… We’re really fast -– all servers are deployed in less than 60 seconds -– and our network stack is 100 percent redundant.”

Alongside enterprise-grade redundancy, the company offers fully dedicated server resources and one-click migration between availability zones. What’s more, Vilponnen said, unlike with Amazon Web Services, the cheapest service levels UpCloud offers have the same level of performance you’d get with more expensive packages. As the tech was built in-house, UpCloud offers a 100 percent Service Level Agreement (SLA) and 50x downtime compensation — that’s a decent uptime guarantee, which should bolster the enterprise-grade status UpCloud is going for.

There’s a browser-based control panel and apps for Android and iOS, while those with more complex control needs also have an API (although it’s not fully Amazon compatible) that they can play with. CPU, memory, storage – both HDD and SSD — OS, firewall and IP addresses are all billed on an hourly basis. Network traffics and storage device I/O requests are billed by use.

Right now UpCloud is being personally bankrolled by founder and CTO Joel Pihlajamaa, who is also Sigmatic’s CEO. That makes it pretty impressive to see the company apparently already undercutting local rivals, if not Amazon itself at this point. For example, Vilponnen showed me a chart showing a low-tier UpCloud package of 2GB memory and 100GB storage priced at €41.84 ($54.47) monthly, versus €57.40 on Elastichosts and €72.03 on CloudSigma (it should be noted that CPU amounts were included in the calculation but not explicit in the price, “as they change quite a lot between the providers”).

“We really think offering constantly high-performing resources at affordable prices is key to how want to position ourselves,” Vilponnen said. “We won’t be able to overcome Amazon in Europe within a couple of years, but we’ve got big plans.”

UpCloud is even offering the first 1,000 people that register from Monday morning (and buy €10 of credit) an extra €100 in free credit, so there’s clearly a fair amount of money to back this up — for now. Bootstrapping will only take you so far in the scale-driven cloud business, though, so UpCloud would do well to raise fresh funding this year, as it intends to.

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Essentially, Telefonica will start selling FeedHenry’s platform to its European enterprise customers with Instant Servers providing the hosting piece. Technologically, the two platforms are fairly well aligned — FeedHenry uses Node.js for integration with its back-end systems, and the Joyent-based Instant Servers platform uses Node.js SmartMachine virtual machines. Predictably, the two companies talk in their statement about “sharing a vision for cloud computing”.

“We are seeing increased demand from enterprises seeking cloud-based mobile app platforms to reduce up-front costs and time to market,” FeedHenry CEO Cathal McGloin said in a statement. “Corporate IT and app development teams will now be able to build applications for the most demanding consumer and enterprise users to quickly and easily deploy them securely to the cloud.”

FeedHenry, which was a finalist in GigaOM’s Mobilize Launchpad contest back in 2010, is based in Ireland, although it recently opened an office in England as its European business expands. Spain’s Telefonica is increasingly trying to push into the cloud, as are most large operators.

“The intersection of mobile and cloud is a natural one,” Telefonica Digital Cloud Director Tim Marsden said in the statement. “Our goal is to accelerate the availability of mobile-optimized, cloud-based services for app development and management, giving full access to cloud services like storage, security, caching, and server-side business logic.”

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ENISA is the agency charged with co-ordinating the fight across Europe, against various worrisome things prefixed with “cyber-”: “cybercrime”, “cyber attacks” and so on. Europe’s new cybersecurity strategy would make ENISA what security expert Ross Anderson recently called “a classified network of military and intelligence agencies”, but the fact remains that the agency is a relatively impartial observer of the security landscape.

When it comes to the cloud, ENISA sees the new approach to computing infrastructure as a “double-edged sword.”  Its report, entitled Critical Cloud Computing, notes as Arbor Networks did, that the concentration of many organizations’ resources in data centers can multiply “the impact of cyber attacks” – effectively, that an attack against one can be an attack against all. It also points to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as particularly hot targets:

“The most critical services are large IaaS and PaaS services which deliver services to other IT vendors who service in turn millions of users and organisations.”

There’s also the issue of critical sectors such as finance, transport and energy increasingly putting their crown jewels into the cloud. However, that’s only one side of the coin. ENISA also sees cloud computing as a pretty good defense against, say, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on specific services:

“Elasticity is a key benefit of cloud computing and this elasticity helps to cope with load and mitigates the risk of overload or DDoS attacks. It is difficult to mitigate the impact of peak usage or a DDoS attack with limited computing resources.”

With regional power cuts and natural disasters, the agency claimed cloud computing can also provide “resilience.” That depends on how resources are distributed of course – just ask customers using Amazon’s problem-prone Northern Virginia data center. Nonetheless, ENISA pointed to the 2011 Japanese earthquake as an example of a disaster taking out “traditional IT deployments” but failing to down certain cloud services.

As for conclusions, ENISA has a series of recommendations for national cybersecurity agencies that includes a focus on making sure IaaS and PaaS providers stay safe, and figuring out just which public services depend on which cloud services. The agency also sings the praises of standardization in the cloud sector:

“Standardization, especially for IaaS and PaaS services, would allow customers to move workload to other providers in case one provider has suffers a large outages caused by system failures or even administrative or legal disputes.”

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