Cloud Portability.

(In the context of Logs of course!!)

So the honeymoon is over.

The Cloud Provider that you so carefully selected is not performing like you expected and you are eying the competition.  You might even be considering re-insourcing back some of your IT services.

So what happens to all the logs? As a customer, can you Trust that your Provider(s) will not let you down and mess with your logs?

Well, first off, whose logs are they?  Are they the Provider's logs because they are logs generated by their physical equipment, or are these your logs because they trace your applications and your virtual systems?

Actually they're both at the same time. Let's see why both parties would need access to the logs and reports.

From a Customer perspective, logs are important because they are an indication of my business processes and I need visibility in those. I need visibility in the usage of my applications, for such purpose as trending and capacity planning.  I also need them for internal reports, to tell the Business Units how they fared and I probably need them for chargeback.

For example, say that I'm using a Platform as a Service Provider to host applications that are enabling my sales team to better serve my customers. What is the usage trending of that application?  Is the application's take rate growing or did we reach a peak and we need to reinvent ourselves?  What kind of horsepower do we need to insure good quality of service and make sure that our applications are humming? How much do I need to bill each BU for their fair share of usage? Can I use this usage information to select my next Provider? What kind of usage expectations do I need to raise? All of these questions are very valid questions, and they can be answered by logs, more specifically by the reports on logs.

Providers have questions of their own, questions dealing with the most popular services and systems, usage trending over time with granularity on time of the day or period in the year, where should resources be focused on, what's the take rate on offers, where to better market them, what are the different services take rate, how much to charge customers?  All of these are questions can be answered with logs and log reports, so Providers also need to keep these logs.

OK, so both parties need to keep the logs or at least reports on the logs.

As a customer, I understand why my Provider needs to generate a last set of report from "my" logs, and I will let him do it provided that I get the guarantee that he will not be able to use this data to infer information about my business. Who knows, maybe he just signed my worst competitor as a client and might be tempted to give him access to my logs?  The Provider can use and generate reports based on my logs, but is not allowed to access the raw logs anymore.

And because I am changing Providers, there is no reason why I should still have access to (old) raw logs anymore, I'm not paying usage fee anymore...  and by the same token I need a last set of reports based on "my" logs.

So the solution could be that raw logs are still being stored a while longer, but they are quarantined, they are still there and available in case of dispute, and in case Law Enforcement needs access to raw logs but otherwise they can't be accessed.

Logs end up in a quarantined bucket for both parties and any/all access to the raw logs or generation of reports should trigger alerts that are sent to both parties so that way there are proper checks and balances on the raw log access and on the report generation.  This bucket does not necessarily need to be a physical bucket, it can be a logical one, all we need is a segregation mechanism that prevents unapproved accesses or at least alerts on these accesses.

Techniques for segregation have existed in the Industry for several years, for example this is exactly how accesses are mediated in DataWarehouse, all data is mixed together - including several owners' data - and access mediation is done at the logical level.

Phew, so are we done with Trust?

In absolute terms we will never be done with Trust.  Building Trust is a process, not an event, and all parties need to constantly make efforts so that everybody else's level of Trust is maintained and better yet improved.

I hope that by now both Providers and Customers trust each other a little bit more thanks to logs; how logs have been collected, how we can prove their integrity, higher-level reports that use them, and can then engage in a mutually-beneficial business relationship.

Next time, we'll talk about some specific use cases, starting with Pay Per Use.  Stay tuned!