Reactively Working in the Cloud

Glad to see you again for this blog posting. Two blogs ago I defined cloud computing and mentioned our industry is focusing almost entirely on the glitzy side of cloud computing such as storage on demand or security and skipping over the critical impact on our organization’s data. In the last blog, I discussed the proactive roles the data professional can play in determining which data subjects belong in the cloud. In this posting I’ll talk about four reactive roles the data professional can play. I made up three of these four job titles (the Cloud Service Broker is an existing role).

• Security Designer. So how well do you know security? A data professional who has a strong grasp of roles, profiles, authorizations, and other security concepts is a very important asset to an organization currently using cloud computing or considering the cloud. Such an individual can analyze and model security and enhance this model with features and functionality necessary for the cloud such as encryption requirements and cloud vendor employee access restrictions to your organization’s data.
• Cloud Service Broker. One of the requirements in selecting a cloud vendor is knowing your data well and knowing the cloud vendor services well. A data professional is a natural for this role because we understand the data structures and integration challenges and therefore the additional work is in understanding the cloud vendor services and then mapping your organization’s data (most likely at a subject level) to the vendor services with the goal of coming up with a robust solution. Here is the formal definition of this role from the CSA Security Guidance document (see http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/csaguide.pdf): Cloud service brokers are providers that offer intermediation, monitoring, transformation/portability, governance, provisioning, and integration services and negotiate relationships between various cloud providers and consumers. Cloud service brokers will abstract these possibly incompatible capabilities and interfaces on behalf of consumers to provide proxy in advance of the arrival of common, open and standardized ways of solving the problem longer term with a semantic capability that allows fluidity and agility in a consumer being able to take advantage of the model that works best for their particular needs. The ‘consumer’ in this definition is our own organization and we would be great at coming up with a ‘longer term’ solution.
• Cloud Cowboy Liaison. In many organizations, project teams cannot perform database functions (like move schemas from test to production) without involving the database administrators, and therefore usually the data modelers and architects. With the cloud however, project teams can build entire applications without anyone with the term ‘data’ in their title knowing about the application. Therefore there could be an incredible number of applications out there that have not been properly architected, standardized, or integrated.  It could be the Wild West all over again (but much worse) as developers can build applications in the cloud and circumvent IT technical platforms and procedures. The Cloud Cowboy (or Cowgirl) liaison works with these project teams and can offer streamlined data architecture and modeling best practices.
• Cloud Mapper. We will need to map data elements (or at a minimum subject areas) to not only source applications but also to cloud vendors. Similar to how we build source/target mapping documents today, we will need to build cloud mapping documents tomorrow. The data professional will need to identify which subject areas and eventually data elements are stored with which cloud service providers. This mapping will also need to be maintained.

Give these roles some thought…having a role like Cloud Cowboy Liaison on your business card or resume can really make you stand out from the crowd! Until the nex