The folks at Amazon have announced a demand and supply based pricing for their cloud resources whereby it becomes cheaper per hour to run your enterprise applications when demand is low. My take on this is broadly positive, as it is getting closer to the true cloud model of “pay per drink” where the price of the drink is dependent on how many other drinkers there are (and the size of the barrel). All of this, however, is completely orthogonal to whether the drink is toxic or not (or whether other drinkers are not spitting in the barrel themselves).
Regardless of the pricing model for computing power, there is absolutely NO correlation with the level of security provided.
When drawing from any shared pool we need to ensure that all drinkers only use special drinking-straws with filters built in like those at istraw. Such "virtual cloud straws" are simply filtering firewalls that only permit "clean and safe drink" to pass the lips of the drinker.
Now, a security drinking straw that also runs in the cloud, is flexible and can be powered on a "pay per filtering" model fits the vision of the cloud. How would it be to provide a virtualized database firewall that runs in the Cloud – filtering out unwanted database accesses and keeping your database from being "sucked dry" or "poisoned"?
Watch this space.
