LegalCloud in the context of the NIST Cloud Computing Definition

The NIST model of cloud computing is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. I thought it would be interesting to do a quick write up of how LegalCloud.net fits into the v15 NIST definition of cloud computing.  It's a model I certainly support, but do find a bit inaccessible to newcommers to the cloud at times.  But, that will change over time.  What follows is some information about how LegalCloud.net, a real life cloud computing service, fits into the NIST model.

Service Models:

LegalCloud is an IaaS model cloud. We are specifically delivering data center infrastructure to law firms on a globally.

In the not so distant future there will be PaaS and even possibly SaaS opportunities associated with and deployed by LegalCloud and it's partners.  There are many possibilities.

Deployment Model:

LegalCloud is a Hybrid Cloud composed of both community and private types.

Our Community is Law Firms and only law firms. This focus allows us to uniquely and completely address the needs of our clients.

As a Hybrid cloud, we provide both on-premise and off-premise services for our customers that bridge the gap between their own facilities and the cloud facilities we manage as is appropriate and necessary.

Essential Characteristics

The LegalCloud console (1.1), which is in Alpha at the time of this writing, is the tool that our clients use to 1.0 LegalCloud Console Default Viewself-provision servers in any of our globally distributed data centers. For the first time publically I’ve included a couple of small screen shots from our staging environment. The things they provision are networking, compute, storage, and a few other related things. The storage components in particular are interesting because they can be further dynamically provisioned and grown (or shrunk) on-demand.

The resources that clients provision via our console are from pools of resources. In our case they are not truly location independent as we must provide a certain amount of auditability. But, they are deployable in various geographies.

Rapid elasticity is primarily a function of programmatic interaction w/ API based controls. We will not have API access for our first release. But, we most certainly will layer it in over time. Now, which one to pick?

Our console in association with something we call a pod manager is essentially a part of a distributed monitoring tool that allows our clients to keep an eye on what’s going on for key metrics in their pod.1.1 LegalCloud Global Servers View

LegalCloud has an currently uncommon “broad network access” model. It’s production environments are only available to clients via secure VPN technologies or private lines (point to point or MPLS). We do not allow general access via the internet at large. Period. Within legal cloud all clients, while they do share some infrastructure, they do not co-mingle their data/networks.

That wraps up my comparison of how LegalCloud can be fitted to the NIST cloud computing model.

What’s next?

What is missing from the NIST model today, if it belongs there at all, are the security aspects. I have seen what is likely to be important and solid work going on around an initiative called A6. It discusses Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance API. This is also now known as A6. There is a great amount of discussion going on in this arena and I’m looking forward to analyzing LegalCloud relative to the A6 API as it matures.

So,  as soon as possible, I will write about the other issues around security related concerns and some of the issues that matter to our clients around varous A6 stated concepts.

LegalCloud.net Update: Enterprise Cloud Computing for Law Firms

Today Mark and I ran a webinar on Total Data Protection for Law Firms and have posted it to our video stream.

I wanted to do a quick post this morning to discuss this since it is almost entirely my focus these last few months.

Total Data Protection is the name of our Enterprise Class Hybrid Cloud Computing service that provides the ability for any Law Firm to provide business continuity for their enterprise compute workloads no matter where they are by leveraging our software stack and Private/Community Cloud deployments throughout the world.

In that definition of Total Data Protection I used some deployment model terms from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing; draft v14.  To review, those deployment models are:

Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Community cloud. 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.

Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting).

LegalCloud.net is a true Hybrid Cloud as it is a combination of Private and Community and provides services both on-premise and off-premise.  It is shared by an organization, that organization is the aggregate of all Law Firms.  If you are not a law firm, you can't use LegalCloud.net.  Period.

We are working very hard to address all the common concerns about enterprise cloud computing.  We specifically address things like auditing, compliance, network security, data security, transparency, data location and the legal Issues surrounding it.

We have other products related to or complimentary to Total Data Protection on the way and in testing.  We'll be deploying our client facing console, a really cool distributed Rails (on the front) and Java (in part of the backend) application, in a very short few weeks to the first clients.  Clients will be able to deploy Total Data Protection, Active Servers, and Provision storage in our globally distributed data centers through this interface.  Our first release will not have a clent facing API unfortunately, but we're trying not to boil the ocean you know.  However, I have started working on this by studying the best of the available API's out there and expect to move forward on specification and early development stages soon.  Of course, the API will not be public, it'll only be available to members of our cloud commnity; law firms.  But, that is the point in our case.

When I started nScaled I never imagined I'd be building a cloud quite like this one.  But, it's exciting to be sure.  My blogging certainly has taken a hit but that's okay I suppose.  Over time I'll be able to blog more and more about the various things we've been doing.

Kent now returns to his usual daily program of coffee, phone calls, infrastructure, and sales calls... 

---Kent Langley, CTO, www.legalcloud.net by nScaled, Inc.