Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(with its Penguin Computing on Demand), as mentioned earlier, are just two simple
examples.
VII.
C
LOUD
P
ROBLEMS
:
S
HOULD
U
SERS
W
ORRY
?
Cloud computing, as indicated above, is an emerging computing service paradigm. Like
other new services of this scale and complexity, there are bound to be fears, uncertainties and
concerns about the technology's maturity. The most important of those concerns can be
identified as those relating to control, vendor lock, performance, latency, security, privacy
and reliability.
In some cases, there is an outright rejection of this model. Richard Stallman, creator of
the GNU operating system and founder of the Free Software Foundation, described cloud
computing as a 'trap' aimed at forcing people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that are
likely to prove costly in the future. He once told the Guardian: 'It's stupidity. It's worse than
stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign”. This view was also echoed by Larry Ellison, the
founder of Oracle, who criticized the 'rash' to cloud computing as 'fashion-driven' and
“complete gibberish” and commented that it would be hard to make money in this technology
which he sees as 'lacking a clear business model' (Johnson, 2008; Hasson, 2008).
IT managers are likely to be wary of surrendering control of their resources to outside
providers who can change the underlying technology without customers' consent. Issues
relating to performance and latency (evidenced by the temporary run-outs of capacity by
some providers) are also cited as problematic.
Furthermore, there are also valid security and privacy concerns. A recent survey of chief
information officers and IT executives by IDC (International Data Corporation) rated security
as their main cloud computing concern and almost 75% of respondents said that they were
worried about security. Recently, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (a not-for-profit
organization), has filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the
security standards of Google's cloud computing, arguing that Google does not encrypt
information held on its servers (Marshall, 2009). Moreover, various governments, such as
those in the European Union (EU), have privacy regulations that prohibit the transmission of
some types of personal data outside the EU. This issue prompted companies such as Amazon
and others to develop offerings using storage facilities located in the EU.
Organizations are likely to adopt a careful approach to cloud computing. A survey by
EDUCAUSE
5
involving 372 of its member institutions revealed that a great proportion of the
respondents with use cases that involved cloud-based services reported that data privacy risks
and data security risks were among their top barriers to overcome (Goldstein, 2009).
Another concern is vendor-lock and failures. Currently, many cloud providers offer their
services through proprietary APIs. Portability is likely to be increasingly important as the
number of cloud providers increases. One solution would be to base those APIs on open
source message standards such as SOAP or REST. In some situations this is already
happening. For example, Amazon is making its S3 (simple storage service) cloud available
through both SOAP and REST and Microsoft ensured that its Azure cloud also supports
5
EDUCAUSE is a US-based non-profit organization whose mission is to promote the intelligent use of information
technology in order to advance higher education.
