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Cloud Cuckoo Land?
Posted by Mark on Nov 18, 2008
So, the people who brought us Vista have “unveiled” Azure so that now our data and applications can live somewhere else, in this place named “The Cloud”.
Rather than seeing this as a retrograde step, a reverse back to the time-sharing mainframes of the 1970’s and 1980’s, where access to a computer was often via renting a portion of someone else’s, this does seem to be a possible answer to the problems of data storage, application management, and data access, and one that takes away much of the headache of managing ones own infrastructure for the purpose.
But, who guards the guards?
Where will data be housed?
Are we going to run into problems of data protection between the different regulatory regimes of the EU, the US and the remainder of the world? How will you know that data you are meant to be taking care of is somewhere safe and has not just been migrated to a nice cheap North Korean data centre?
How will the data be secured?
It is a human habit to act dangerously and for what is out of site to be out of mind. With computers there is a further dangerous belief that what sits behind a pretty graphical interface must be alright, but looks are only skin deep. How will we know that our data is being kept safe and can be recovered when there is a problem, or will we just be expected to be satisfied that “there has been a problem with the cloud” and do we want to “send a report”, “oh, and you had better start typing”. We have performed data recovery from most things, but where to start with a cloud eh?
Will our commercial independence be protected?
Once we are on the cloud, who controls the distribution of parachutes? Will we be sucked in to storing our data in a closed controlled environment from which we cannot escape? True, even with “local” applications and data once we have set up our systems it is often a massive cost to change and we stay with things that are imperfect because “they will do”.
Having everything somewhere else does just feel a bit wrong, like there could be a nasty sting in the tail somewhere along the line if we are not careful. The world is currently suffering what could turn out to be the worst financial crisis ever, largely because we did not ask questions, forgot about regulation and were reckless, let’s make sure we don’t follow suit with our IT systems.
