The same issues come up again and again — with government officials, educators and industry practitioners alike.
And all of the concerns are legitimate, when you consider the value of the data we are talking about moving to the mysterious cloud, particularly from a government perspective. Yet caution has been taken to such an extent that we can forget that it has been around — and has been used by all internet users — for years.
Your Gmail accounts mean your credit card details, personal exchanges with family and friends, photos, passwords to other accounts, even bank statements and more, are all hosted on a cloud.
That data sits on a server, perhaps neither in your country nor under your government’s jurisdiction, and worst of all — not bound by any SLA.
If that makes your breath short, think about your Facebook account. How many friends do you have on there? Friends who are linked to other friends and acquaintances, an online world where the furthest you are from the remotest stranger is only a short six degrees.
Your relationships are mapped out, data is visible and fluid, the pages you visit religiously, who appears in the most photos with you, what events you attend. All this information is on the cloud, and in many ways it has contributed to the concerns about the proliferation of information.
People have been placing enormous amounts of personal information on these websites — Google, Microsoft Messenger, social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Friendster, Facebook, and Myspace have paved the way for different variations of cloud to be adopted.
I often wonder why there is great public concern? Why not governments to sign the correct SLA for putting your national ID number, address, certificates, applications forms, health records, examination papers et cetera on the cloud?
If vendors (who offer you a free service) can be trusted with vast amounts of information, surely governments can be trusted to harness the cloud to better services, engagement and delivery?
As Michael Mudd, Chief Representative of the Open Computing Alliance told me recently with regard to cloud computing: “If look deeper, you are not talking about security. You’re talking about trust.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Xinghui Guo
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 17.01.2011
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