Tides and Clouds
Today there are a lot of very motivated, well resourced people trying to push you into the “cloud”. Facebook want to see as much of your private life in the cloud as they can, but are doing their level best to remove the private part. An advertising company called Google want to own your every email so they can target advertising back at you whilst selling that privilege. Apple would like you to watch all your movies and TV through the cloud and charge you per view. Microsoft would love you to move the Exchange licenses you own into the cloud and start renting them all over again. Salesforce are convinced they can host your CRM and Xero your whole accounting system. Seems anyone with an eye for a quick buck is climbing on board.
Outsourcing isn’t a new idea, it’s just had a lick of paint and a new name. But sooner or later the same old problems will surface. Hardly have the paid off researchers declared it a trend of tidal proportions and concerns are surfacing.
On November 15th, Australia’s financial regulator, APRA, sent an open letter to the banking sector reminding them cloud computing is just outsourcing that requires the regulators approval. They said cloud computing is untested both legally and technically. They argued seemingly innocent things like messaging, calendaring or collaboration systems are, in fact, core business infrastructure and listed three specific concerns:
Continuity; how will the institution continue when the service fails? Implicit there that it will fail. Confidentiality; having outsourced control, where is the er., control? Compliance; wouldn’t it be wonderfully convenient if, after you’d committed fraud, the proof was offshore and inaccessible by enforcement agencies?
Many of us don’t have a business large enough to have compliance or confidentiality concerns. But this is just the tip of an iceberg. Consider this. Microsoft’s December patch Tuesday includes 17 patches, three denial of service vulnerabilities, but fourteen either remote code execution or elevation of permissions (to remote execute code). Sadly, once you move your data into the cloud it’s going to be remote from you. You think browsers are under attack now just wait until hackers stand squarely between you and your data.
Another concern is Australia isn’t included in the cloud, except as a client. They talk about how America has exported their manufacturing base but where do we think cloud services are hosted? Maybe we in Australia don’t fully understand the wider dynamic here, because we pay for data even if you outsource. An American hosting centre doesn’t charge you for data. That’s right - unlimited downloads for free. In Japan a fibre line costs $100 a month. In Sydney the same ISP will charge you $1500 a month for 2MB service of lower spec. It sure doesn’t make economic sense to base anything in Australia.
In response to the APRA open letter did CRM vendor Salesforce announce plans for an Australian based hosting centre? No, they announced Mr Daniel Burton, senior vice president of global public policy would visit Australia. He said Australia has no laws on it’s books that suggest data has to stay in-country. “We will be having a serious engagement with the Australian Government about cloud computing.” he said. Goes a long way to explain why spin doctors get paid more than technicians.
So if you believe spin doctors and vendor paid researchers the cloud is inevitable, like the tide. I’m not convinced because there’s a lot of wallpaper over the cracks. I think like this; the NAB is outsourced. Just think how much faster the NAB would have recovered from their outage if the whole lot was hosted in India. Or China. I imagine trying to get an Indian call centre to correct your credit record. I wonder how clean your business will stay when everyone uses a browser as their main work tool.
I wonder if the so called “tide” is just a bow wave from the good ship “band wagon” passing through.
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