The Fifth Elephant 2016

Cloud adoption has now entered the “early mainstream” stage as enterprises increasingly look to cloud deployment as a viable model for agile, cost-effective IT delivery. However, the prevailing binary paradigm of cloud infrastructure (public versus private) limits the extent to which enterprises can fully leverage the on-demand, self-service, elastic resource provisioning attributes of public cloud while maintaining the same security, reliability, performance, and management frameworks present in current private cloud implementations. Hybrid cloud solves this problem.

This talk discusses Intuit’s data journey to the public cloud (Amazon Web Services), while also having one leg in the existing private cloud (or Intuit’s own data centre). It will focus on one of the first data pipelines we designed and implemented in Intuit to cater to Intuit’s charter of migrating its services and applications to the public cloud. Challenges addressed include the following:

1. Managing and securing data at rest as well as in-flight on a shared infrastructure as opposed to the earlier isolation of Intuit’s own data centre.
2. Evaluation of different AWS services for being enterprise ready and to comply with Intuit’s security requirements.
3. Secure flow of data across the public and private clouds in the hybrid infrastructure.
4. Focus on leveraging the maximum potential of the elasticity, reliability, durability and availability guarantees of different AWS services.
5. Control levers on data access.

Outline

In this talk, I will talk about the following:

1. Business use case of Intuit’s pipeline in the hybrid cloud.
2. Design and Architecture
3. Security challenges in AWS components.
4. Data security at rest.
5. Data security in-flight.
6. Network and user policies for controlling access to data.
7. Re-stacking of infrastructure to avoid security breaches.
8. Flow of data between Intuit’s datacenter and AWS.

Speaker bio

Abhishek has close to 4 years of experience in Big Data Technologies and Amazon Web Services. Working as a Staff Engineer in the data organization at Intuit. After graduating from IIT Roorkee, Abhishek worked for companies like NetApp and Inmobi before taking up his current role at Intuit.