Understanding the Cloud

The new-trend in the global market is for innovative technologies to show up for the consumer market before they are available to the business market. Every corporation is under pressure from its employees to allow them to use these new technologies at work and at home, this pressure is bound to get stronger.

Younger employees are simply not satisfied with old technology, and they are not impressed about carrying a second laptop, where newer tools allow for seamless data transfer, storage and retrieval. These employees are either going to figure out ways around the corporate policy, or change jobs or move their skills to a more trendy company. Either way, senior management is going to have to relax on their policies to satisfy this trend. It might even be the CEO, who wants to get to the company's
databases from his brand new iPad that will drive this change.

Technology trend such as; cloud computing makes data access much easier. More and more, employee computing devices are nothing more than dumb terminals with a browser interface. Where corporate e-mail is a webmail, corporate documents are all on GoogleDocs, and where all the specialized applications have a web interface. It is evident that employees can gain access to corporate and personal data through any up-to-date browser. It is no surprise why many Fortune 500 companies are already doing this with their partners, suppliers, and customers.

With Facebook boasting of 150 million active members and 500 million registered members, all storing their personal data in the cloud this trend is gaining momentum not just with the younger employees but also amongst business executives. For instance Wikileaks recently stored confidential documents; the US secret diplomatic cables in the amazon cloud. The security of such practice is entirely a different issue; in this case, Wikileaks intention was to damage the confidentiality of the documents.

Business executives from Microsoft to Cisco and down to the technology startups are trying to offer solutions to the impending security challenges. Like everything else, it's a mixed bag: some of them will work and some of them won't, most of them will need careful configuration and understanding by the users to work well.

By understanding the following classification of data, you will be one of only 7% global users that securely engage the cloud:

• Service data is the data you give to a public cloud in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

• Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.
• Entrusted data is what you post on other people's pages. It's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over the data once you post it, the other user does.

• Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over it, and you didn't create it in the first place.

• Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.

• Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends are students, you are likely to be a student yourself.

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Security is always a tradeoff when it comes to technology and trends, and security decisions are often made for non-security reasons. In this case, the right decision is to sacrifice security for convenience and flexibility. Corporations want their employees to be able to work from anywhere, and they're going to have loosened control over the tools

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