For those of you who doesn't know Cloud Computing, here a 30 seconds explanation of what it is. Beside being the latest buzzword clogging mailboxes, it a computing paradigm that refers to a way to uses resources available on Internet. It allows to distribute servers, resources and data on Internet without the need to consider where the applications or the data is located.
That is real nice, but what does it means? If a picture is worth a thousand words, an example should be at least a few hundred words. Here some examples that you can use every day.
- Google analytic
- Google docs
- Microsoft Office live
- Salesforce.com
Basically everything that has Software as a Service (SaaS) attached to it is part of the cloud. Of course Cloud Computing is way more than that, but we'll explore what constitute Cloud Computing in later post.
So Software as a Service is software that you can use directly on the web. Why buy a license of Microsoft Office when you can use Google doc or Microsoft Office live? I use Google doc as an example because I use it (a lot) because it's free and that I have a Google account. I do have a blogspot account after all.
Google doc accounts can contains spreadsheets, text documents and presentations.
Now going back to our main subject...
The problem with Cloud Computing
What is the main problem with Cloud Computing? It can be resumed into one simple sentence.
Who owns the data?
Simple question enough. With the my Google docs account I have spreadsheet that contains personal information. Just like any word or excel documents, we always save things that we want to keep to ourselves i.e.: Financial calculations in spreadsheets.
When the document is located on your hard drive, it is clear that if somebody accesses it without your consent, it is a crime, because you own the data. But the data that is on some server located somewhere else. How do I know that nobody does access my file that is named "My back account numbers"? Well there is no way to know whether ma data is secure or not. I have to trust Google and their employees have high level of ethics. OK, Google doc does who accessed the file and when the last time it was accessed. But those of you who knows computers knows that there is always a way to access documents without leaving traces.
The good thing with Google doc is that you can save your document locally as Word, Excel, PDF and many more format. With other SaaS, it is not as good. Another example: Google analytic, sure you can access your data anytime you want, but do you truly own it? Not really, you cannot export the raw data or even the aggregated data as excel or even CSV.
They say it's your data, but if it's yours, shouldn't you be able to export it for your own personal usage? I think so. But why doesn't the providers of SaaS doesn't allow you to retrieve you data? Simple, you data ensure that you will keep using their applications. With Google doc it doesn't matter much, it's free. But with other applications where you have to pay a license, if you stop paying the license, you loose the ability to access you data.
That's it, the big problem with SaaS, you don't really own your data. Some of them, you can't even retrieve it to stop using the Service where the data is hosted.
So next time you have a vendor doing a presentation about the SaaS he's supposed to sell, do like I do. Ask him if you can export the data and what level of granularity you can have when you export. You'll have some fun looking at him trying to spin a NO as a positive thing.
-- Simon
