Computing in the Clouds, Part II: It’s About Security

By Kennedy Maize

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What do Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have in common?
Courtesy: IBM

They are all examples of cloud computing. And they work well, as Google, owner of Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, and a variety of cloud computing technologies, understands far better than many others in the information technology business.

This article was written in Google Docs, a cloud application, in order to demonstrate the seamlessness of the technology as it applies to web technology and conventional desktop applications.

Google’s Gargantuan Cloud Bank

The most successful information technology firm since Microsoft, Google is a dedicated evangelist of cloud computing, defined as moving data and applications from company-owned enterprise computer servers to the shared resources of the Internet. Google believes that the cloud is the next great thing in information technology. The company may be right, and plenty of folks are betting that Google is on the money.

If Google and other advocates of cloud computing are correct, computing, including enterprise computing, becomes a shared utility, much like electricity. Google becomes the Edison of computing.

IBM, the venerable graybeard of computing, is also ponying up big investments in cloud computing. The company has launched a series of television advertisements at U.S. sporting events touting the cloud, in its many definitions. See this video of IBM’s take on cloud computing.

Google offers a range of cloud computing applications, from Gmail to word processing (Google Docs), to spreadsheets, to presentations, to mapping (all direct and effective challenges to Microsoft’s desktop paradigm), to an excellent online calendar, to a plethora of services once on your desktop computer and now up in the cloud. Its latest launch is Buzz, a Facebook-like social network application that has taken heat for, initially, automatically connecting Gmail users, their contacts, Picasa photo albums, and more to Buzz. Google’s goal is to own the cloud and maximize the resources and services that supplant company-specific, desktop enterprise computing.

We reviewed the fundamentals of cloud computing in MANAGING POWER’s January-February issue. That article addressed why cloud computing isn’t just a reincarnation of computer time-sharing of the 1970s but a new approach to wide-area networks. It’s a wide, wide, wide, wide world.

The business promises of cloud computing are clear: lower cost, higher performance, simpler interfaces, and costs scaled to use. That translates into less money locked into the ever-increasing company IT budget, and more financial and operational flexibility.

Cloud Power for the Power Industry

For the power business, cloud computing offers big benefits in areas where utilities have huge customer databases, often shared by other utilities. Also, companies with multiple generating units, or large single units, have needs for enormous parts catalogs and inventories, repair manuals and practices, and maintenance routines that can benefit from a cloud approach that doesn’t tie up company capital in server islands and proprietary databases. That can reap cost benefits from sharing across the company and the industry.

Combo utilities—including those that provide electricity, natural gas, and telecommunications (and, with some munis, water)—may find cloud computing approaches to customer information worthwhile. Instead of company-specific or service-specific databases, it may be possible to share data across detailed customer information packages in multiple databases. Regional and multiple-service utilities may find cloud computing a lower-cost approach to reaching broad customer markets.

In this article, we look more closely at the security issue, one of the fuzziest areas of the cloudy world of globally shared computing resources, aka the cloud. Security is potentially a weak spot in the cloudy firmament, but one well identified by the practitioners.

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