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Security
Similarly, nobody wants to be in the
news as the next big company to lose
credit card or personal data to online
attacks. So, some may argue that
security trumps availability when it
comes to cloud services. Be that as it
may, security represents some very
real and considerable concerns on the
road to mass corporate adoption. The
whole point of the cloud is to share
physical resources, and the technology
provided today allows virtual
separation that is equivalent to the
physical segmentation in the past.
Cloud consumers will expect these
networks to detect and eliminate
configuration errors before they are
exploited by cyber attacks or cause a
mission-critical application to fail.
Fortunately, tools are available that
can be adapted to the cloud. Large
enterprises are already becoming
increasingly dependent on IP
networks, or more specifically are
operating multiple IP networks
managed by geographically dispersed
groups, and have already been tackling
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Security represents very real concerns on the road to corporate adoption. |
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to expose their network assets and
processes to consumers as well as
collaborators in the value chain. BSS/
OSS will play an ever-important role in
removing the complexity of this
distributed process and management
by providing a comprehensive support
system encompassing all aspects of
the service control and management
including policy and monitoring.
Aggregation
While most of the cost savings from cloud will come from economies of scale, there are savings to be had from economies of scope by managing additional services or features. Communications service providers already provide these features for traditional services with high reliability, and can add value to the cloud by applying competencies on behalf of the supply chain in areas such as:
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security issues. Providing a cloud-ready
tool set will be critical to preventing
security from becoming a cloud
showstopper.
Access
The real unique factor for cloud
services is anytime-anywhere access.
Existing, underutilized (but often vast)
data center networks could put content
closer to customers, thereby improving
their view of cloud services. Content
Delivery Networks are the first look at
this problem for media services;
however, this could extend into all
cloud content. Making your data
replicated closer to you to ensure
better reaction times may be the factor
that nets one CSP a contract over a
competitor, as users demand fast
responses from networks and service.
To make that happen, they will need to
continue their behind-the-scenes effort
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User authentication
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Parental controls (and the like)
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Subscriber preferences (delivery, advertisement)
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Cross-screen user experience (consistency across a mobile phone, a television set, or a laptop)
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Catalogs (particularly for smaller content vendors)
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Billing on behalf of others
Aggregation would help to minimize costs (time and/or resources) that would have been borne by or passed on to the individual consumers of cloud services above and beyond software and platform agreements.
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