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Cloud computing- Your opinion.

Eddie Dane

Philosopher
Eddie Dane
Joined
Aug 18, 2007
Messages
6,681
I've been experimenting with Google docs and I must say I quite like it.

It's just great having your files ready where and when you need them.
Sometimes I work on texts with external copywriters,and it's great for that too.

But there are some dangers that I can think of, and I hope to get an opinion of the more computer literate on these forums.

Security:
How safe is this actually? My files are stored god-knows-where on a server. Is there a significant security risk?

Reliability:
Gmail goes down from time-to-time. If the timing is bad (I have deadlines) this could get me in trouble.

Control:
I feel just a bit weird about giving so much control to an outside party. It's unlikely that they would ever deny me access to my files, but I do give control away in some measure.

What do you think of Google Doc (and similar)?
If you had a company, would you let your employees use it?
 
Its a good idea and will get better. There are security concerns, but I'm not sure they are a show stopper. Salesforce.com, for instance, is huge. Many companies large and small log their sales lead data there with little fear of it being stolen or abused. The big HW and SW companies are all developing products to create, manage or exploit both public and private clouds and I'm sure we'll see a LOT more of this in the near future.

As a business owner I'd be concerned with google docs for highly sensitive information - M&A target info, key strategy stuff and the like. But, for the bulk of the day-to-day drudgery.. why not?
 
Google's Eric Schmidt was recently interviewed at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo and he had a few things to say about cloud computing...

www.readwriteweb.com What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Full 45-minute video:
​

news.cnet.com Cloud computing security forecast: Clear skies January 27, 2009
To critics, cloud computing can't be trusted because you aren't in control of the data outside your network.

But if that's the case, then how secure are the data and collocation centers that corporations contract with to host their data?

<snip/>

...handing over the data is still a cause for concern among many corporations.

"What are they doing to the data? Is it persistently encrypted? Are there access controls in place? Do you get to monitor who they hire and who cleans the data centers at night?" said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of PGP Corp. in relaying the concerns on peoples' minds about cloud computing.

<snip/>

Securing the data is key to a cloud service provider's business, Selipsky said. "We can afford to devote resources to it that, quite frankly, most of our customers can't," he added.

"Cloud computing can be as secure, if not more secure, than the traditional environment," said Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps. "Most organizations really struggle, whether they want to admit it or not, securing their networks."

<snip/>

Then there are the statistics that show that one-third of breaches result from stolen or lost laptops and other devices and from employees accidentally exposing data on the Internet, with nearly 16 percent due to insider theft.

"Cloud computing can fix some of these issues," Feigenbaum said.

<snip/>

Most data theft results from someone authorized to access the data doing so improperly or handling the data carelessly, he said. With cloud-based services, when a user logs out, the browser cache can be set to flush automatically, leaving nothing on the desktop to be lost or stolen, and logs can show who did what to which data, he added.

"This is inherently safer than the typical client-server model of downloading data that remains on the end-user device, and is far more secure than distributing data as e-mail attachments whose subsequent use and transmittal are largely uncontrolled," Coffee wrote in an e-mail reply to questions.

<snip/>

There have also been precursors to cloud computing that people are familiar with, such as the evolution of answering machines to voice mail services, said Peter Evans, director of security strategy and technology integration at IBM Security Systems.

"It is as much an emotional thing as anything," Evans said. "When my data is on my server in my building, there is a good gut feeling about that. When it's out in the ether, how do I know it's protected?"
Click to expand...
 
I've got no idea what cloud computing even is. The company I technically work for seems to think that it's a good idea though.
 
Gmail is an example of cloud computing

Your emails 'live' on a Google server out there in the mists of teh etherwebs, not on your hard drive (unless you download them, of course)

The cloud symbol has long been a metaphor for the Internet
 
Ah. Okay. So can you explain it in the context of the following statement - which I copied from an all-staff message I received earlier today?

"Some organizations prefer a private-cloud solution for mission-critical applications using sensitive data in order to retain maximum control over their own and their customers' information. <Organisation> meets that need with the Secure Private Cloud Solution."

Does that mean that Gmail requires a password to access it?
 
arthwollipot said:
Ah. Okay. So can you explain it in the context of the following statement - which I copied from an all-staff message I received earlier today?
Click to expand...
I can guess...

Maybe "a private-cloud solution" involves an intranet (cf the Internet), which - presumably - has its own security features (e.g log in and password)

Does that mean that Gmail requires a password to access it?
Click to expand...
Well... Gmail (like this forum) requires a password, by default... Without 'extra' security (typically imposed by your own IT department), you can 'save' your username and password onto your local machine so that you log in automagically
 
Google apps offers a whole package of interesting "cloud" applications.

Theoretically you could run your whole office on Google apps, providing you had a broadband internet connection.

First there's Gmail, which can be configured to have a custom email address (You@it.com) rather than the cheapo looking @gmail.com
Then there's a whole office suite, of which the only drawbacks are that the spraedsheet programs cannot handle the really complex stuff (apparently).
But you can calculate, word process and make presentations to your heart's content.
The big advantage is that you can share everything on line, like working on the same text document with someone without sending new versions back and forth (which is an absolute horror).

It's free for private use, and for business use, I believe the fee is quite small.

If I were starting my own small-scale business today, I think I'd plonk down a couple of Ubuntu machines, get two separate broadband connections (two, just to have backup) and run my office from the net.
Make your calls using VOIP, and you're in business with apretty low overhead. :)
 
I'm actually doing a presentation and a paper about cloud computing security, oddly enough. It's nothing major, but I've found some neat info. A lot of companies already use it. Facebook and Wikipedia for example are using the distributed model to host their content. Amazon.com has several companies that offer content-delivery services in a cloud format (similar to how Akamai works). SETI@home is a neat usage of cloud computing for research, and BitTorrent works in a similar fashion. It's a form of distributed computing, and the concept isn't new, the concept has been around since the 1960s.

There are lots of security concerns. Who is responsible for the data? Is each participator using the same security methods? How is the data encrypted? How do you keep corporate information contained and secure? Cloud clusters may be spread out around the globe, so some clusters may not have physical security.

Different service providers have differing answers. I think Google is using a pretty decent model. Any decent provider will use a strong encryption for account information and use SSL (which is solid, but has flaws) when logging in. Downtime is kept to a minimum, but as you know things can go down. With cloud clusters it should prevent most issues even in the event of physical clusters going down.

Private clouds are an extension of the regular cloud format. I think it's similar to a VIP suite in an exclusive club. The problem with normal clouds is that the user has little control over how the information is stored. Critical data could be physically on the same disk as someone's cat photos, for instance. Private clouds create create a special protected cloud within the cloud that requires a secure (such as VPN) connection to access it. That way, presumably, only users with authorization (who have been authorized to have the VPN connection information and logins) can access it. It is another layer of security. I think most clouds are secure by nature because that's what customers want, but virtual private clouds are a few steps further.

A neat thing about clouds is that all of the technical stuff is abstracted from the user. They don't need to know how or where the apps and data are stored and used - they can just use it. Google Apps has a dashboard for all of their apps that customers can use.

I think that software as a service will become more prevalent as bandwidth increases. Even at work we use software piped in through a cluster of Citrix servers. Very few programs are actually loaded onto the machines. We even have a bunch of Wyse thinclients that do not have physical drives, it's all loaded through the network when someone logs in. Granted, our thinclients are horrid, but they work in a pinch.
 
arthwollipot said:
"Some organizations prefer a private-cloud solution for mission-critical applications using sensitive data in order to retain maximum control over their own and their customers' information. <Organisation> meets that need with the Secure Private Cloud Solution."
Click to expand...

I think there are two main motivations for cloud computing. Gmail is an example of the first one, where the main importance is put on being able to access your data from everywhere.

The main motivator though is efficiency, which is also a valid reason to use Gmail. The classical way to run an IT infrastructure was to buy separate machines for every single task that had to be performed. All these servers must be managed separately and take a lot of space and power. Often they are underused, while other servers are getting overburdened, which makes managing very expensive.

The idea behind clouds is that you pool all servers together and offer virtual computers running on this "cloud". You can create and delete virtual servers on the fly, often within minutes. For example if you have known peaks in your computer load, you can expand the capacity for that particual virtual server or create new instances at one time of the day, and reduce them when the peak is over. The capacity that becomes available can be used for other services. If one physical server goes down, load is shifted to others automatically, so you don't really care.

The idea is born in companies that have already really large amounts of servers, like Google and Amazon. Amazon has this running as a commercial service "EC2" and offers pre-made virtual machines, running Windows and Linux. Everything is on demand and you pay only for what you use (cpu, disk, network, ...)

If you don't trust your data being on external machines, you can create such a cloud inside your own data center. I think that's what they're talking about in your quote. Some companies sell "cloud-creation" software. I've heard even that Amazon has plans to extend their cloud inside your own data-center. They are managing everything for you remotely, but your own data stays inside your data center.

I've just started at a job where they are using a bit of Amazon EC2. Let me tell you in a few months how useful that appears to be.
 
arthwollipot said:
Isn't this just like the "thin client" craze from ten years ago?
Click to expand...

Perhaps.

But I'm not an IT guy.
Ten years ago this was something our IT guys talked about over lunch, and I barely understood what they were talking about.
Today it is something that I just tried out for free, from home and without any special knowledge.

Seems like it has finally arrived.
 
The general concepts of cloud computing are not new. For decades, people have been buying CPU-time and storage-space in each other's data-centers. Until relatively recently this has been limited to academia, government, and large corporations. What's new is that these services are now available to the public.
 
Right. Okay, I get it. It basically is the thin-client idea of ten years ago, but done in a manner that actually works.

Larry Ellison must be kicking himself right about now.
 
Eddie Dane said:
Reliability:
Gmail goes down from time-to-time. If the timing is bad (I have deadlines) this could get me in trouble.
Click to expand...

This is the main reason I'll stick to MS Office or whatever else will come by for the foreseeable future. It's not just the Gmail, it is also my ISP, my modem and my network card, all of which can fail. If any of that happens on, say, the evening of a long weekend (for example, thursday, dec 24th) and I need to have them done by monday, it creates an essentially unsolvable problem.

I know the solution isn't perfect, but it's better to rely on as few failable devices as possible, IMHO :)

McHrozni
 
arthwollipot said:
Right. Okay, I get it. It basically is the thin-client idea of ten years ago, but done in a manner that actually works.
Click to expand...

I guess you could say that, sure. The reason thin-clients failed before was not so much because of the client machines themselves, but because support for them was not there. We didn't have Amazon and Google and whoever else providing the masses with cheap storage and computing clusters. We didn't have double-digit megabit connectivity to the average home. We have those things now.
 
arthwollipot said:
Right. Okay, I get it. It basically is the thin-client idea of ten years ago, but done in a manner that actually works.
Click to expand...

Yeah, sort of. But, toss virtualization into the mix as well. Now, not only do you have a server out there serving up applications that would otherwise be installed on your computer, but that server is likely a virtual server, one of several virtual servers on a box that scale automatically and may even be mirrored on other boxes. So, it matters less what box the server is on, what box has the actual applications installed, and what box stores your saved work.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future some enterprises have simple workstations with nothing but a very thin OS and a browser or a portal/portlet to their cloud. Almost exactly replicating the mainframe/dumb terminal setup... of the 70s. An enterprise like Google could do this for customers such that millions of users could have a very rich internet experience with little more than a TV as a home computer.
 
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