All I want for Christmas from Santa Cloud

David Linthicum| Infoworld

Hey, it’s Christmas time. Although I’m sure I’ll love all the gifts from my friends and family, I want a few from my cloud provider friends as well. Here’s my list. I can’t wait to see what’s under the tree.

Common security framework that works across providers. Although there are certainly good cloud security approaches and even good technology, it’s still tough to find common security solutions that work across providers.

Cloud providers may understand how to secure their own clouds, but they have very little to talk about when it comes to how their security solutions work with other cloud providers, both private and public. Most will tell you how their stuff should be the center of the universe, so you should use only their stuff. However, it’s a multicloud world, and distributed security frameworks are a much better and more strategic way to go.

Assurances around the “noisy neighbor” issues. Most public cloud providers have issues of some sort around multiple-tenant management using a predefined number of resources. This means that a batch job may take you 10 minutes on Monday but 30 minutes on Wednesday. Why? Other tenants are using shared resources, and their usage may vary from time to time.

It’s an easy problem to solve, as I see it. Moreover, vendor performance should be addressed in the SLAs. In most cases, there is no mention.

Better API management and governance. Although most cloud services are accessed using well-defined services, very little thought goes into how these APIs are managed, secured, and governed.

Most cloud providers seem to view responsibility for API management and governance as the API consumer’s problems. However, I see it differently. Cloud computing providers should offer a common framework for API management that works as a standalone solution or that works well with the existing API management platforms and cloud management platforms.