Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 19
“The Cloud” and Privileged Access
This chapter is going to outline the prior context to Cloud computing, what it actually means in practice, what the
issues are with deployment, and how EM12c enables a transition to using private or public clouds. You'll see how to
manage both identity and privileged access during that process by using the integrated capability between EM12c and
BeyondTrust's PowerBroker tool.
Everybody's talking about moving to “the cloud,” and even Mr Ellison has reformed his initial skepticism, stating
that Oracle's main competitor is now Amazon. According to sources within Oracle, “Cloud” will become the single
greatest income stream in the very near future. What is the cloud, why and what are the issues? How is this relevant to
a DBA team? But first, the background context.
Historical Context to the Cloud
The
Harvard Business Review
published just over 10 years ago about the commoditization of IT (find it at
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3520.html
). Centralized commoditization is one contributing factor to what we
understand as cloud computing, but it is not the whole story. There is a larger battle here—the battle between local disk
storage and centralized servers. Going back a few decades, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems had very different models.
One was based on local disk storage and the other was based on the “network as the machine.” Cloud is really the
extension of that debate. The enabler of cloud is having a reliable network bandwidth for mobile, home, and work so that
local storage is needed less, and thus the potential of using applications based
on
the network is now being realized.
What Is the Cloud?
Essentially, the cloud is a form of outsourcing to a shared infrastructure, usually from a vendor that used to supply
software to be used locally, but that now supplies the service of using that software on their cloud platform.
The major categories of cloud design are:
1.
Public
- an Internet-accessible version of previously internally accessible applications that
are hosted by Oracle; see
https://cloud.oracle.com/home
2.
Private
- internally consolidated and centrally provisioned applications benefitting from
cloud-oriented versions of the same applications that had been previously de-centralized.
12c database and quickly provisioned VM-based applications form internal capability.
3.
Hybrid
- both of the above. Public and private applications that are integrated so that an
organization can test the water and have internal capability in case of migration issues.
Also allows division of sensitivity, i.e., commodity IT can be outsourced while keeping
sensitive BI-type applications in-house (BI is Business Intelligence).
4.
Cloud-to-Cloud
- integration of web-based services
