Compliance in the cloud refers to the process that monitors controls and provides reporting, while retaining evidence of compliance with legislative or industry mandates and internal policies. Important to bear in mind is that compliance requirements are country- and industry-specific. Cloud computing represents a new paradigm, but like the platforms before, cloud will not replace everything. The question to ask is, what parts of a company's technology and data portfolio should exist in the cloud?
Problems arise when the company becomes unsatisfied with the vendor or simply wants to switch to another software package with better features or lower cost. Suddenly, your IT people realize that everything, including all of your data, is locked in a proprietary system that the vendor will not reveal to you. Moreover, if that vendor stops supporting the software or even goes out of business, you have no way of recovering your data.
The report, entitled Trends to Watch: Government Technology, was carried out by independent analyst firm Ovum and details key government technology trends set to make their mark next year.
In addition to cloud computing, the report predicted data analytics and agile development as other emerging trends.
The industry roils with definitions and explanations of cloud. These definitions come from product vendors cloud-washing their products, cloud providers positioning their cloud infrastructure, IT teams attempting to cloud-paint their efforts in virtualization, and even from consultants writing articles like this.
This article will examine the essence of cloud and will provide a solid working foundation against which progress toward the cloud can be objectively assessed.
In August 2006, then-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, introduced the phrase ‘Cloud Computing’ during a keynote presentation. That was five years ago, and roughly marked the start of the ICT industry’s interest in cloud architectures. But was Google really the first company to come up with the term – a neologism, which still doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, but doubtless soon will? Here’s what Schmidt actually said: “What's interesting is that there is an emergent new model. I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a cloud somewhere.”