How To Fight The Cloud?
Once word hit our office of the upcoming Google Wave, we saw renewed interest in leveraging such collaboration tools, which means we have to again evaluate our stance against putting our intellectual property ‘in the cloud.’ (I really hate that term)
Putting information in the cloud means relinquishing control of that document to whatever provider is hosting the application as a service. Our business can basically be boiled down to “information provider” (I work for an architecture firm). A large chunk of what we sell is information in the form of computer-generated drawings, schematics, pictures, animated fly-throughs, etc.
Therefore our information, our intellectual property, is our life-blood. If we lose control of it and the competition gets it, we’re dead in the water. We can’t compete for jobs if the competition knows what we plan to propose and how much we plan to charge. A huge part of competing for a job in our architecture niche is being able to deliver something so unique that it blows away the competition. Therefore securing our information is very important to us.
The future of collaboration obviously lies in the cloud. We’ve been able to resist so far, but I don’t expect that to last.
So I’m posing a question to both readers of this blog 
How do you deal with the risks of putting intellectual property in the cloud?
I don’t think the future is necessarily the cloud, yet. Cloud is just another way of saying what we’ve always had for years. If this was 2 years ago, Google Wave would simply be called a mash-up. 4 years ago, SaaS…
This also means when Google messes up (see 2 gmail outages this past month), your business processes that rely on Wave will be down and at their mercy. Or when access controls break down (I think 2 instances in Google Apps this year).
These are fun-sounding consumer technologies, but they’re just not geared to support a business that people rely on for their livelihood.
On a personal note, Google is the last company I would trust with my information. Being public, they have the deepest need to monetize whatever they do, and they do that by harvesting and analyzing the information at their fingertips.
By LonerVamp on 10.02.09 7:43 am
The future of collaboration is most certainly in the cloud and services such as Google Wave are driving that. Services like Skype, IM, Google Apps, etc explode in the consumer sector and find their way into the enterprise naturally. Our users are already using these tools, against policy, to collaborate because they are more ubiquitous and user-friendly than the enterprise apps. We see it a lot, especially when collaborating with much smaller organizations that have less money to invest in enterprise collaboration tools or don’t have the same tools we have and hence can’t interface with ours.
You make several good points very clearly, especially the point about it being fun consumer technology that’s not appropriate for enterprise use.
This ties into the argument of building security into the information itself. If we could assign an ACL in metadata bound to the actual information, we could put that information wherever we wanted.
By Michael on 10.02.09 8:18 am
I just think putting security into that information itself is going to end up being a pipe dream. Maybe if that had been started in the 80s…
I do agree, however, that this is the future of collaboration, don’t get me wrong. I just think “cloud” as a term and movement is overhyped and once that dies down, we’ll be back with the same old enterprise tools, only a little better for the competition.
I really dig your point about smaller businesses, because that’s going to drive larger and larger businesses to address this issue and allow such things, because certainly smaller businesses aren’t going to be springing excess money to get the big boy tools. That and consumers, I mean, freelanders/contractors as well.
By LonerVamp on 10.02.09 11:49 am