The Cloud! The Cloud!

Almost a month ago now, I nearly pulled down a 'Murphy's law' style curse on myself. My sweet, dear, and dying computer (it is old and has suffered a few falls) stopped recognizing my external hard drive, which stores all my music. I was telling a friend about this situation and nonchalantly said, "So, as long as my iPod doesn't fail, I should be fine". Not wise, not wise at all. Less than a week later, while changing from my bike clothes, I placed said iPod on top of the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom at SH, promptly forgot it, and lost it. Tragedy had struck and I was left music-less. I started to panic a little about the possibility that it was the hard drive that failed (also a victim of one too many falls), and not my computer, and that ALL my music would then be gone, gone, gone forever! After breathing deeply into a brown paper sack, I sought the help of professionals, and with their magic, I am now back in sonic business. Huzzah!

This episode, however, got me thinking. I had felt confident in having saved my 'important' files in TWO places, but it didn't take much for that confidence to be shaken and to feel that my system had serious vulnerabilities (e.g. ME). I had been hearing about the rise of saving to the 'cloud' and had even been offered an introductory trial of Amazon's Cloud Player, but didn't know much about it any of it, if it was a viable alternative, or if it was all that secure. Recent news about Amazon and Sony's online information storage problems, Sharon's post asking about the security of GoogleDocs to store passwords, etc., as well as Rita's post about Dropbox all continued to peak my interest about The Cloud! The Cloud!

So, here you go. The Nitty-Gritty-Reader's-Digest version of cloud computing:

At its most basic, cloud computing allows for a "separation between the resources used and the user's computer" (i).. 'The Cloud' is a continuation of the paradigm shift away from having physical, tangible information sources and storage to using the infinite, though nebulous (pun!), 'space' created by the innumerable amount of networking computers that are the internet. One common analogy is that of public utilities. Having centralized public utilities (water, electricity, gas) frees the individual from needing the materials and machinery to produce the utilities for themselves. Similarly, The Cloud allows for companies, and increasingly individuals, to "increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software" (ii).. One 'library' example would be if a patron forgets their flash drive/ thumb drive/ whatever, and they email the document to their own email address. They have, effectively, 'increased their capacity' without spending $10 on a flash drive/ thumb drive/ whatever.

Okay. Okay. I see your yawns, and hear those whispers of 'old news'.

Keep in mind, that a lot of the discussion about Cloud Computing is designed for companies wanting to implement cloud computing, and not necessarily for the individual cloud computer, so this might not seem like the most applicable information.

So, here you go. The Nitty-Gritty-Reader's-Digest version of 'Is this Safe Or Are We All Just Drinking the Cloud Cool-Aid?' we have all been waiting for:

Webopedia.com identified three major security issues when dealing with The Cloud.

• Data Protection: Securing your data both at rest and in transit
  




• User Authentication: Limiting access to data and monitoring who accesses the data
  




• Disaster and Data Breach Contingency Planning
  (iii).
  

Data Protection: The key to data protection is ENCRYPTION. What is encryption? Think Wingdings or Code Talkers or Pig Latin, anything that 'codes' your data so that a person (or robot) would need the appropriate key to access it, but much more complicated, I'm sure.

In answer to Sharon's question about the security of GoogleDocs, Google says (not surprisingly) ENCRYPT! If you are on an unencrypted network (so an open wireless network, for example), use https://docs.google.com instead of http://docs.google.com. The extra 's' means 'secure', all traffic is encrypted. It may, however, be a little slower. I use Google A LOT and feel like I am almost always directed to the 'secure' site without having to intentionally direct myself there. If it makes you feel any better, Google itself stores ALL its confidential information using GoogleDocs, using the same servers as us. They're drinking the Cool-Aid, and THEY ARE geniuses.

On the other hand, from what I understand, encryption was the downfall of Sony in this last month's gaming gaff. Mid-April,

"Sony of Japan revealed that names, addresses, passwords and possibly credit-card details of 77m accounts were stolen when hackers gained access to the network it runs in 60 countries for its PlayStation online-gaming system, as well as for Qriocity, a service offering music, films and television shows" (iv).

Sony had thought their users' information was well encrypted, but their encryption software may not have been sophisticated enough. Hackers are an inherent risk of trusting The Cloud.

User Authentication: Another security weakness of computing in The Cloud is assuring that the people accessing the information are the people who are supposed to access that information. For the individual that means:

- create strong passwords and mix 'em up on occasion

- log out between sessions

- on public computers, make sure the 'remember me' box is not checked

Disaster and Data Breach Contingency Planning: This one seems to be out of our, regular ol' consumers, hands. It was a lack of disaster planning that knocked Amazon out this past month. Apparently, a problem in a data centre in Virginia upset a significant amount the of the servers that support Amazon's cloud computing, which in turn supports a large amount of other online companies. We can't control natural disasters, but as consumers we can choose companies like Dropbox, which are hailed for their contingency planning.

In summation:

If I may? A pithy existential thought about loss and loss prevention:

In this fleeting life of ours, how safe and permanent can we expect anything to be? My brief brush with music loss, reminded me that, had I stored all my music on CD's in a CD case, and it was stolen from my car, there would be no recovery. Or, one day, if/when Steve Jobs invents the NEXT format leaving my collection of digital music obsolete, there will be no recovery. While identity theft is THE PITS, there is nothing that can be saved to The Cloud that can be more valuable than our lives, health, family, etc. Is The Cloud inherently safer or more dangerous than a file cabinet in a house that could burn, be burglarized, or get swept up in a tornado? Life is tenuous, and information/technology is just stuff. That's all I'm sayin'.

That being said. Cloud Computing for the individual consumer is still relatively new and young. It has created new business models, new security issues, and inevitably new companies to address those issues. Keep an eye out, and pretty soon flash drives may be as antiquated as floppy disks. Welcome to The Cloud! The Cloud!

Resources and Additional Reading:

(i.) Wikipedia.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

(ii.) Infoworld.com

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031

(iii.) Webopedia.com

http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Hardware_Software/Security/cloud_computing_security_challenges.html

(iv.) The Economist

http://www.economist.com/node/18620636?story_id=18620636&CFID=169975855&CFTOKEN=76864004

Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/AP04116285032f42558bfd0a043e1635d3.html?KEYWORDS=amazon+outage

PC Mag (about dropbox)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343852,00.asp