In a story that remains free notwithstanding the magazine’s recent movement of more content behind a pay wall, the brand new Economist takes an overview of cloud computing. It gets right to the point:
A storm brewing?
First is the familiar risk of technological lock-in, as rival companies promote their own, mutually incompatible, standards and formats, as they have done in the past.
CLOUD intends to solve that problem for information about you. What better way to avoid technological lock-in for Internet users than to create a multi-industry standard computing language that puts people back in charge of their own information? Turns out this approach addresses the Economist’s second and third concerns — privacy and security — too.
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#1 by Gary on October 15, 2009 - 3:04 pm
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Paul, CLOUD’s Chief Strategy Officer, has been around the world of standards, with his work on XBRL at the Securities and Exchange Commission for Chairman Cox, and he is right that a new approach can ensure privacy and security in the cloud.
The interesting thing about a battle of the clouds (or intercloud problem as Vint Cerf calls it) is that from the perspective of a rain drop (or the individual), there is no such thing as a cloud, just another stop in the water cycle.
If who you are and information about you are no longer in the same data silo, privacy is no longer a promise but a built-in reality. The goal of CLOUD and ME 1.0 is to reorient our information in the cloud, leaving data where it is, but separating you from it. In the process, you are back in charge and providers that depend on data can lower their costs dramatically by moving the locus of the security problem out to the edges. By disaggregating data, the whole notion of privacy is reoriented.
Aggregating doesn’t necessarily have to mean putting data in yet another electronic filing cabinet.