Trouble ahead for cloud computing

From... http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/08/06/apple-co-founder-st...
Joe McKendrick

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs and one of the original brains behind the PC revolution, predicts trouble ahead for cloud computing, especially when it comes to privacy and data security.

Steve Wozniak. Photo: Wikipedia

According to a report by AFP’s Robert MacPherson, Wozniak opened up in an audience Q&A about his concerns, predicting that cloud is “going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.” Wozniak was appearing at “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a one-man critique of Apple by Mike Daisey.

Wozniak also warned that “with the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away.” Instead, he urged that more data and applications remain local. “I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”

Security and control are certainly valid concerns, and many enterprises are struggling with these issues as cloud computing becomes an increasingly pervasive part of doing business and conducting our lives.

Wozniak appears to be talking mainly to individual consumers, but his cynicism and caution should also be heeded by companies as well. For enterprises, these concerns help drive the movement to private or hybrid cloud, in which data and computing resources remain in the hands of a company’s IT department, but are deployed, cloud-like, to internal departments as well as external partners and customers.

Ultimately, the competition that comes with having today’s huge variety cloud providers — be it Software-as-a-Service (applications), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (storage and servers), Platform-as-a-Service (middleware) or anything else as a service — helps provide choice to IT buyers, thus keeping the pressure on vendors to do the right things in terms of security and user control. Cloud is about choice, and needs to remain so.

Some CIOs I have spoken to in recent years also recommend that companies apply the same due diligence to cloud providers as they do to on-premises solution providers. Get everything in writing, and insist on the same transparency that comes out of one’s own in-house IT operation. Get involved in building and maintaining good working relationships with the vendors. That means getting involved in a user group if one exists for the application, participating on a customer advisory panel, or having regular face-to-face meetings with the cloud vendor.

To do cloud right, it needs to be more than a credit-card transaction with some far-off entity. Get to know your cloud provider just as well as you know your outside financial advisers, marketing consultants, or other business partners. Cloud is now one of the most important business relationships you may have.