| | June 20178CIOReviewA Glimpse into Cloud Computing By Susie Wee, VP & CTO of DevNet Innovations, Cisco [NASDAQ: CSCO]IN MY OPINIONHow has the Cloud changed the operating model (for APIs and developers) during the last five years?In the past, developers who were writing large-scale applications needed special access to on premise compute, networking, and storage infrastructure to test and deploy applications. The cloud has given developers "press of a button" access to compute resources around the world. The cloud also provides much greater access to APIs and the cloud services associated with them. This greatly simplifies how developers can access APIs and empowers them innovate on top of them. The ease of use is incredible--offering developers an easier way to write apps and get them to scale quickly. What do you think are the biggest obstacles that Cloud technologist face in working in a more agile and outcomes based model?The power of the cloud also brings along many challenges and obstacles. The easy access to APIs and global scale deployment greatly exposes the attack surface of cloud applications and data, making security, privacy, and threat protection top concerns. Layer on top of that the varying data sovereignty regulations by country on where data can be stored and how it can be used. It's no longer as simple as press of a button compute; you need to be really careful about how you architect and design your system so you can get maximum innovation in a way that matches these requirements. Also, the operating model for cloud can be quite complex with public, private, and hybrid clouds. The reality is that when you're writing an enterprise application, you need to develop it for a multi-cloud environment. Furthermore, business applications often touch a lot of data including customer information and proprietary details. Often times, you're mixing information from customer and business databases. To combat this, you need to sit down and understand the systems you have and the external systems you want to interact with. You need to think about what kind of information am I dealing with--what data is public and private and what data can be shared with whom? How do we handle mission critical business data and customer data? What are the performance requirements for accessing it and how quickly will it change? Once you understand this, you can work through how to design your cloud application and data architecture in a way that all the data and APIs can be accessed in the right way, taking security and performance considerations into account.
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