Per usual, James Urquhart published a thought provoking post on cloud computing and geopolitics. Recently, as part of my 100-day cloud watch, I’ve pointed out the importance of cloud computing environment location in respect to data residence. In his post, James goes further, or perhaps better stated, starts earlier. Raising awareness on the paths that data travels, to reach its destination:
“How would an application operator deploy applications at a minimum "distance" from users in a network sense, without finding themselves passing data through a country that would jeopardize the safety of that data? Again, the path your data takes between two physical locations may not be the path you expected.
You are already seeing some examples of how the governments and corporations are trying to mold the Internet and "the cloud" to fit into human geopolitical realities. Countries like China, Iran, Pakistan, and others have demonstrated their willingness to control the Internet transoms over their nation’s borders, and to apply technology to controlling the "border traffic" at those crossing points.”
In his post, James makes some great observations on computing versus world boundaries, and poses a challenge for cloud computing, networking, business and political leaders:
“What’s missing, however, is any form of formal infrastructure within the Internet/Intercloud itself to "automate" mapping the human world to the computer world. Is this even possible, I often wonder. Can we (or, more to the point, should we) try to "codify" the laws and regulations of the world into digital form, allowing computer networks and applications to self-regulate?
What would the political fallout of such a system be?
In cloud computing, "virtual" geography and "physical" geography are both extremely important, and it’s up to humans to keep the two aligned. Because this is complex and prone to error, it may be one of the great business opportunities to come out of the disruption that cloud computing is wreaking on IT practices.”
Read his post. Remember it’s not just the destination, but also the journey that counts.
Tagged as:
geopolitics,
intercloud,
James Urquhart,
location
Posted by brenda michelson at 11:38 am in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, data, networks | Permalink
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Last week, in discussing findings from the BT Global Services Enterprise Intelligence survey, I wrote about why cloud computing environment location matters:
“Many of the clouderati will tell you that the physical location of the cloud computing environment shouldn’t matter to adopters. While technically and architecturally this might be true, given appropriate and reliable network connections, there are business implications of physical location. Most notably, regulatory and compliance concerns for cloud-resident data.”
Today, via Twitter, I became aware of an Interactive Data Protection Heat Map, published by Forrester, and shared on their Infrastructure & Operations Professionals blog:
“To help you grasp the varying scope of regulatory requirements at a high level, we’ve also created an interactive privacy heat map that denotes the degree of strictness — highlighting scope of protection, affected entities, ‘adequacy’ standards met, and heavily surveilled countries — across national data protection regulation.”
The map is in Flash, go check it out.
Tagged as:
enterprise considerations,
Forrester
Posted by brenda michelson at 2:31 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, data, regulatory | Permalink
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Next on my cloud computing survey list is BT Global Services Enterprise Intelligence survey. The survey is broader than cloud computing, covering “CIOs and their relationship with senior corporate executives and IT systems users.” The survey report includes:
- the relationship between corporate information business performance
- demand for information
- successful collaboration
- what the CIO needs to do in the recession
- the challenges facing cloud services
- security in the cloud
- global attitudes to business success
- the role of the CIO
As someone interested in active information and the business-IT relationship, I found interesting points throughout the report. However, the one cloud computing finding I want to call out is cloud location.
Many of the clouderati will tell you that the physical location of the cloud computing environment shouldn’t matter to adopters. While technically and architecturally this might be true, given appropriate and reliable network connections, there are business implications of physical location. Most notably, regulatory and compliance concerns for cloud-resident data.
The BTGS Survey focused on the likelihood to use cloud computing environments in another country:
“For example, the majority of CIOs (57%) and senior executives (53%) around the world are not happy to run applications and store data on servers based outside their country, for IT security reasons.
Perceptions of where servers should be based revealed a pro-European focus. For CIOs and senior executives, the UK was the most popular place in the world for servers to be based, with a quarter (25%) saying they would be extremely comfortable with servers being based there. This was followed by North America (22%), Western Europe (20%) and Nordic Europe (18%).
Conversely, two thirds (68%) of CIOs and senior executives said they would be uncomfortable with servers being based in Africa, closely followed by Latin America (53%), Russia/Central Asia (43%) and the Middle East (40%). The reasons cited for such unease were security/political issues, service quality, distance and time zone issues and cost. Perceived high cost was specifically mentioned in relation to North America and Nordic Europe.”
Survey methodology: “Conducted by Datamonitor Ltd. Total sample sizes were 274 CIOs and other senior corporate executives in 12 countries and 2,476 employees who use corporate IT systems in 13 countries. Fieldwork was undertaken between 1 September 2009 and 30 September 2009. The survey was carried out online.”
Tagged as:
BTGS,
enterprise considerations,
location
Posted by brenda michelson at 3:00 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, assurance, compliance, cyber risk, data, regulatory | Permalink
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Cross posted from elemental links. Commentary on Event Processing and Cloud Computing about midway through the post. Personally, I see a big tie (opportunity) at the intersection. I’ll share more on that another time. Original post follows.
Session Abstract: Roy Schulte and Dr. Chandy released a new book on Event Processing in October 2009, aimed at business and system analysts, architects, application managers, CIOs, and technically-oriented business managers. This session will highlight the key points of the book and explain why and how mainstream IT departments will ramp their use of event processing up during the next ten years.
Dr. Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He has received numerous awards including the CMG Michelson Award, the IEEE Kobayashi award, and the Babbage Award.
W. Roy Schulte is Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. He was the lead author of the 1996 Gartner report that introduced the term SOA to the industry. Mr. Schulte originated the research in the field of message brokers, coined the term business activity monitoring (BAM), and wrote the first analyst reports on the zero-latency enterprise and the enterprise service bus (ESB).
Yesterday, Roy did a rapid-fire session on Event Processing. more >>
Tagged as:
eventclouds,
GartnerAADI,
live coverage,
ManiChandy,
RoySchulte
Posted by brenda michelson at 1:10 pm in Blog, analyst positions, data, enterprise integration, event processing | Permalink
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David Berlind is our Evening in the Cloud host. David says the discussion shouldn’t be about cloud computing definition, it should be about cloud computing benefits. The benefits will lead to the ‘right’ definition. Panel Format, each panelist has 8 minutes to “pitch us” as though they were visiting our organization. more >>
Tagged as:
archives,
Atmos,
Christopher Reichert,
David Berlind,
Doug Cornelius,
EMC,
enterprise2.0,
Google,
GoogleApps,
IBM,
live coverage,
Mike Feinberg,
MIT,
Rajen Sheth,
Sean Poulley
Posted by brenda michelson at 7:13 pm in Blog, adoption, compliance, cyber risk, data, provider positions | Permalink
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This evening, we are at Cloud Camp. For background, check out this interview with Cloud Camp co-founder Dave Nielsen. Dave is also our host today.
The lightening rounds are done. For insights, search on twitter with either of these tags: #cloudcamp #cloudcampinterop
Now, Dave is building an un-panel session. He started with 5 empty chairs and no questions. Filled the chairs with folks who raised hands to “Folks that know a lot about cloud computing”. No one admitted expertise. Now, he’s asking the audience to build a list of 10 questions.
more >>
Tagged as:
archives,
CloudCamp,
Dave Nielsen,
DMTF,
Interop,
James Urquhart,
John Willis,
live coverage,
RightScale
Posted by brenda michelson at 9:41 pm in Blog, compliance, data, fundamentals, security, standards | Permalink
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