You are Never Alone

I had a chance today to listen to the ABC Radio National Background Briefing which I referred to yesterday. I used both the transcript which the above link gives you, but also listened to the podcast stored at Mediafly.

The main concern about cloud computing seems to centre around the storage of personal sensitive data. Cloud computing brings with it the fact that most of our creations, stuff that we would regard as our personal intellectual property, will be stored at mega-data centres stored around the world.

The attraction for most of us will be the simplicity, the fact that we don’t have to install software. We’ve seen the beginnings of cloud computing in Australian education with the NSW Department of Education outsourcing emails for students for Google through gmail. They access their email through a browser. It wasn’t so long ago that our education systems banned the access of gmail and hotmail accounts, and that is probably still the case in many educational institutions.

Another example can be see locally here at education.au through edna Groups, and me.edu.au, our social networking site for Australian educators. Access to personalised spaces in these places is through a browser, using our locally created Single Sign On process. None of the data that people access in either in these places is stored on the user’s local computer. What gets stored on your local computer is a cookie that makes the login process easier. What users like is the fact they don’t actually need to worry about the software that provides these services.

Some of the other concerns that have been raised

• Reliability of the service - if your service goes down for whatever reason what can you do? How do you access your documents stored in the cloud then?
• What about if the data centre where your data is stored collapses or disappears?
• What if you want to move your content from one data center to another? Is there interoperability?
• Storage concerns. Is storage finite? The world needs more and more storage, demand doubles every 18 months. the Petabyte Age. A petabyte is a quadrillion bytes. It’s reputed that Google processes 20 petabyes of information a day.
• Data centres mean server farms, using vast amounts of energy. They cost enormous amounts to build and need uninterrupted power supplies. They generate significant amounts of heat. Most of the buildings are actually air conditioning units.
• Legal and contractual obligations of the service provider.

I had a look at a couple of other documents today too, that you might find interesting.

The Privacy Rights Clearing House published an alert on The Privacy Implications of Cloud Computing. In case you think you have not yet got any links to cloud computing look at the examples the article gives:

All you need is an Internet-capable device. It doesn’t even need to be a computer.
Other examples of cloud computing include:

• Web-based email services such as Yahoo and Microsoft Hotmail
• Photo storing services such as Google’s Picassa
• Spreadsheet applications such as Zoho
• Online computer backup services such as Mozy
• File transfer services such as YouSendIt
• Online medical records storage such as Microsoft’s HealthVault
• Applications associated with social networking sites such as Facebook.

Some of the other major players in cloud computing include:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Amazon
• Salesforce
• Sun Microsystems
• Oracle
• EMC

This article led me to another:
Ann Cavoukian, Privacy in the Clouds — A White Paper on Privacy and Digital Identity: Implications for the Internet (Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario), www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/privacyintheclouds.pdf .

The White Paper looks at some of the issues, including 21st century privacy challenges, some cases, the need for development of a user-centric identity management infrastructure, open standards, interoperabilty, and audit tools. It is an article worth reading too.
What is significant is that we need to recognise that the internet has entered a new phase. We’ve been calling it’s forerunners web 2.0, but as saying goes, we’ve only just begun.

This year in our edna workshops we’ve been trying to make people aware of their “digital footprint”, but in her White Paper Ann Cavoukian uses a term that I like better - that of “digital bread crumbs” throughout cyberspace. “Digital footprint” seems to imply something organised about what we do, whereas “digital bread crumbs” invokes a sort of Hansel and Gretel image. We drop the crumbs wherever we go in cyberspace and quite often we don’t realise we are doing it.

hmm. another topic for another blog posting I think.