Dangers of Cloud Computing Being Ignored?

[sirfrancisbacon]

I've noticed quite a bit of hype regarding cloud computing over the past few years or so. However, what I find slightly unsettling is how, well, the vast majority of intelligent people (in addition to corporations) seem to support the idea even though it seems to signal the end of privacy.

So let's just suppose hypothetically that accessing applications and services from the cloud becomes far more feasible, nicer, and overall an order of magnitude better than running traditional applications. Would people choose to compute over the cloud then?

If it were me having to make the choice, I think in the end I'd choose to completely avoid the entire scenario, even if it meant risking being labeled a technophobe for life.

I just find it interesting, and I'm starting this discussion in hopes of perhaps wondering whether the majority of people consider whether power or freedom is more valuable in the end.

[pj]

Cloud computing is still a very confusing topic for many. If you think, like techies do, that cloud computing is a technology that enables rapid scalability of information systems, then it doesn't mean you have to leave your privacy in the hands of the big three. You can run cloud computing within your firewall and still reap the rewards.

Unfortunately, the marketing bandwagon has morphed cloud computing into a technology that must be outsourced. This isn't always true. I work for a hybrid cloud company that enables systems that span the corporate data center and the outsourced data centers.

Sometimes corporate, or even personal data, is private, and sometimes it is public. You have to decide for yourself which info must be kept on your own systems and which can be outsourced. Does it really matter if your product catalog is running in the Rackspace Cloud or on a machine in at your office? It's probably better to be at Rackspace. Customers are still accessing the data from the internet. Why worry about your corporate network going down or the server crashing? Leave it to the experts.

But maybe your R&D or your employee benefit database could be retained locally. It's not a rip & replace sort of scenario. Sometimes it may be, perhaps for the smaller IT shops, or SMBs that don't have infrastructure of their own. For them, cloud computing is freedom and power. SMBs want to focus on running their business, not running a rack of servers.

There is still a lot of FUD to overcome. If you're a technology person and you've implemented scalable systems the old way, with your own servers, or colocation, or whatever and then done the same kinds of systems using cloud computing, it's really unbelievable the difference between the two. Technology people are so much more productive when they don't have to worry about maintaining the physical guts and they can concentrate on the software.

Of course, this means that those people who maintain the guts at big companies are really going to push back on Cloud Computing, because it threatens their jobs. If IT shops don't have their own infrastructure, then they don't have any job for infrastructure people. Work forces are going to shrink and those individuals who feel powerful because they do little work with a lot of people under them are going to be afraid.

Cloud computing is going to shift that equation where those who do more with fewer people by more effectively leveraging scalable technologies are going to thrive in this market. It's very difficult to fight faster, cheaper, and better and cloud computing is all three.

The risk to privacy is overblown. If companies are afraid of losing control of their data, they'll implement cloud computing like systems, "Fogs" or "Private Clouds" or something of that sort and manage it themselves.

Really though, for the consumer, nothing is changing. If they use software as a service or online email or something like that, it doesn't matter to them if they are using "cloud computing" or their software is running on a single machine out there at a colocation facility. They don't know the difference. Most consumers will never know the diffference and they don't care, why should they?

This is actually one of the risks to cloud computing. The marketing push to call it "anything on the internet." To them, it's the same thing we've been selling that for decades and now there really is something different going on and we are losing the essence of that difference to the sales and marketers who are trying to capitalize on the gold rush.

But this transition to cloud computing is inevitable. It might not be called cloud computing after a couple years. Some even argue that Amazon EC2 actually isn't cloud computing at all because it doesn't scale automatically, well, they've added that functionality recently, but before that it was debatable.

Still lots of confusion. Everyone is trying to control the meme and adapt it to their particular business model. It's a war going on right in front of our eyes.

[dejan]

I agree. There is also a bigger issue that concerns me. Clouding is not any different than having a single server from the user perspective. The data still is centralized, as one central entity owns your data, even though they organized the back-end as a cloud.

Regarding the privacy issues- as long as one such entity hold/maintains your data, they dictate you what you can and can't do, what you can say or not, share or see, thus what is legal or illegal.

China and Iran - cut services, while the US (and Europe in somewhat) try to protect conservative methods so that their backers (read companies) can earn more money. Copyrights are coming to their dead end, while new business models are emerging. What you do with your data is your own business, and laws need to be rethought as gravity laws do not apply to electrical current - the forces that pull are different.

We need democratization, decentralization and de-copyright of the Internet, where we own a slice of the global cloud and data can be shared over it no matter what its contents are.

I'll soon post an open source project I am working on to tackle these issues. Hope to hear more comments.

[alexandros]

There have been proposed alternatives, at least on the whiteboard level..

http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv:0903.0694

Disclaimer: I am an author

[dejan]

Has there been any form of prototype implementation?

[alexandros]

Just bits and pieces as parts of a current EU project, nothing coherent. We are still working out the pieces in theory, particularly 'community currency' and the programming paradigm. While it is our desire to focus our energy on finding out how much 'cloud computing' can be had without compromising local autonomy, the speed depends on how much support we can get, as we can only do so much in our free time.

[dejan]

What kind of support have you applied for? FP7? I am a little bit disappointed how little support is given for research by the EU.

[alexandros]

The project you mentioned in this thread sounds interesting. Maybe we can take this offline? You can email me at a dot marinos at surrey dot ac dot uk.

[leecho0]

I think this is an interesting topic. But before we can even get started, we need to get a sense of what we are talking about when we're referring to cloud computing. I have my own prediction for what cloud computing will look like in the future at my blog http://lchou1.blogspot.com/2008/12/future-of-computing.html

If you agree with that vision of computing on the cloud, you'll see that software and the way we interact with it on a daily basis will be completely different. Just like how television changed media, cloud computing will change technology. For instance, moving things to the cloud means you can access the information anywhere, so "your computer" won't be a physical entity, but an account, and soon, you probably won't need a full computer to access these services. So I don't think it's right to just say that cloud computing will "just" be better, it's going to change the game.

As for privacy, I think it's a good trend that this is being brought out into the open. If someone had the desire, people can find out a great deal about you with what's available now. Knowing about it and actively trying to protect privacy is the only way to prevent the big-brother scenario from happening. There was an article on something related to this not too long ago on hn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685095

[RK]

People still don't encrypt their email (at least the overwhelming majority of them). The convenience of ubiquitous mail access across multiple devices has made encryption even less likely (i.e. do you carry your private key with you everywhere?).

I doubt consumers will care much about the privacy of their data in "the cloud".

I can only assume that companies with data that needs to be private will take appropriate steps to protect it, but as we've seen with lost laptops, usb drives, etc., they don't always take the best of precautions.

[drhowarddrfine]

"However, what I find slightly unsettling is how, well, the vast majority of intelligent people (in addition to corporations) seem to support the idea even though it seems to signal the end of privacy."

In what way does this signal the end of privacy? Just because a company could access and use your data does not mean they will. Once a company starts doing that, it will be the end of that company.