Cloudburst 2: rescue parties
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Events in April may have served as a wake-up call for cloud computing. But help is at hand – and while IT chiefs may be looking at the technological issues, corporate info pros will be concerned that it’s their documents that are being floated off.

As LiveWire has suggested, recent embarrassments surrounding Amazon and Sony may induce bosses to take more of an interest in cloud migration decisions. If they do, there’s a growing number of places that they and the staff they instruct can go for help.

Fujitsu, for example, has recently launched a Cloud Consulting Service; after some years of hype, Cloud is set to move from theory to practice, says Fujitsu UK & Ireland’s Jo Millott, and one thing Fujitsu can do is help customers develop a road map for harnessing Cloud to drive business value. Fair enough – but Fujitsu also sells ICT-based business solutions, so are there any more neutral sources to go to?

As Information World Review reported recently, two not-for-profit industry bodies are collaborating to help increase best practice in cloud service provisioning. The Cloud Industry Forum (which has already produced a report on United Kingdom cloud adoption and trends) is joining forces with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

In an article in the Register Security newsletter, Vladimir Jirasek of the newly formed CSA United Kingdom & Ireland arm sets out the issues powerfully. Cloud is “outsourcing on steroids”, he says; you might not always know where your data is and so you need new skills to manage it.

Globally, CSA has already produced guidance on critical areas to focus on – including governance and enterprise risk management, legal and electronic discovery, compliance and audit, and information lifecycle management. A further CSA report highlights the top threats, covering not just abuse or malicious insiders, but also simple mistakes – like deleting or altering a record without a backup of the original, or unlinking a record from a larger context, rendering it unrecoverable.

As both these CSA reports imply, much of the effective management of cloud-based services doesn’t involve technology but document management – coupled with the encouragement of good practice among knowledge workers. Looks good for info pros – but there’s a catch.

 A new study by Forrester Consulting shows that financial firms struggle with e-discovery and data privacy, worrying especially about reputational damage coupled with regulatory investigation and regarding an incredibly wide range of content types as critical. Fine – except that the report was commissioned by Bloomberg to promote its own cloud-based archiving service Bloomberg Vault (see Nancy Davis Kho’s LiveWire comment on this).

Beyond the purely technological aspects, the Cloud should be classic info pro territory. But we mustn’t assume that we’ll have it all to ourselves.

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