Monday, April 20, 2009

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Cloud Computing and Trust

For me one of the biggest hurdles for cloud computing is trust. I read this post recently from Jonathan Schwartz's blog over at Sun on cloud computing. One thing that jumped out at me was the little graphic Jonathan posted from OpenOffice. The graphic showed file manager from an OpenOffice beta and its ability to "save to the cloud". Looked pretty cool right? But then I thought, what would I save there?

Jonathan's graphic of OpenOffice is nothing new. Google has been doing this a while with Google Docs and so have many others albeit not on the scale of Google. I have used Google Docs to store documents and spreadsheets but I have never put anything out there that I would consider sensitive. It's a trust issue and a privacy issue. In fact a lot of companies even block that kind of thing through firewalls and proxies for just that reason.

Cloud computing is obviously a lot more than just a big document repository I used for an example. However, the trust issue which is mainly a perception issue in my mind will have to be overcome to allow cloud computing to reach the potential others are touting. I also believe smaller sized business will be more likely to take the perceived risk than the bigger ones. What do you think? Are you ready to start using the public clouds for business critical sensitive information?