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Cloud Computing: Community Clouds Begin to Gather
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines a Community Cloud as follows:
The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy,and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.
A community cloud with tighter controls on who can access the system offers greater security than the public cloud and provides many of the same benefits which include:
- Multi-tenant environment
- Elastic environment that can grow or shrink based on demand
- Elimination of the need to invest in direct infrastructure and software license costs
- Fast setup of development and test environments
- Quick application and web hosting rollouts
- Easier backups
One example of a community cloud is the Federal government initiative being led by Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. Last year, IBM established a Federal community cloud based on Kundra’s direction. Another example of a community cloud is a project at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. In that project, 14 area hospitals will share access to fetal ultrasound and other patient information. Other industries are expected to follow.
Omar Kayed, principal consultant at Convergent Consulting Inc. in Toronto, said in a SearchCIO article: “I think community clouds will be the trend in the financial services industry. Companies want to take advantage of the cloud, and the best solution is to build their own community, so that security is guaranteed.”
In June, the New York Stock Exchange introduced the Capital Markets Community Platform, a virtual trading hub that connects financial trading companies of all sizes. Data centers for the NYSE community cloud will be based in Mahwah, New Jersey, with plans to later establish trading satellite hubs in Sao Paolo, Toronto and Tokyo. The NYSE community cloud was built using technology from Hewlett-Packard, EMC and VMWare. The system has been optimized to enable huge numbers of transactions with very low latency. It will be an isolated network with no connection to the Internet.
Stanley Young, NYSE Technologies CEO, said that “Order management systems, execution management systems, back testing—so much of the flow can be contained within the physical walls of our data center, reducing the time to trade.”
One of the economies that will come as part of the community cloud platform is the common hosting of historical financial data sets. Historical financial data sets are very large, but with a community cloud, only a single live copy of the data is needed, rather than each participating company needing to host their own copy of the same data.
Another advantage of having a common platform for trading is that it provides more equitable access of the market to financial companies of all sizes. Agency brokers, hedge funds, institutions, data suppliers and technology vendors will all have access to the system. It will also be easier for small startup companies, for example, to get started without having to make massive initial investments in infrastructure.
