ETS created a program of aggressive exploration of public cloud services as a full part of their IT services plan. Beyond just pilot programs, ETS uses real applications for examining and measuring the actual enterprise payoff potential from cloud processing.
One of their earliest explorations involves an automated, compute-intensive speech recognition application. Ultimately, the recognized speech is turned into a test result, and that collection of test results can be scored automatically. The ETS application meets the important criteria of highly variable demand based on schedules and volume of tests given.
But the ETS program has also investigated the circumstances and consequences of weak (or non-existent) service level agreements (SLAs), and the security issues stemming from a lack of transparency and control as services move into known public clouds.
Two of the most important security circumstances for ETS involve intellectual property protection and the loss of data access control in the cloud. ETS responded to these concerns by applying their findings and conclusions about SLAs and public cloud security to their decisions about which applications are suitable for cloud service and which are not.
Those findings generated additional constraints on acceptable applications, and those constraints are the means by which transparency issues are reduced and sufficient digital trust is created. Furthermore, ETS decided to maintain its own core processing capability for the application, and let the cloud service in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) be invoked as a “cloud-bursting” response to surge needs.
This is an example of how ETS has taken action to reconcile risk and policy compliance issues to find safe candidates for cloud processing. Now, ETS continues to hunt for practical applications that meet safety criteria and is moving forward with success using a very practical and very contemporary technique to establish enough digital trust to capture the value they seek in the cloud.
— From "Digital Trust In The Cloud," by CSC's Ron Knode