terms of job security. Although small businesses have been quick to
adapt and even welcome cloud computing, larger corporate customers
have voiced a plethora of concerns about handing over their
operations to another company. Another legitimate concern has
centered on cloud providers going bankrupt, especially in a shrinking
economy. Yet another concern is security — in an ongoing survey
conducted by the research firm IDC, almost 75 percent of IT executives
and CIOs report that security is their primary concern, followed by
performance and reliability [56]. The cloud computing industry
continues to make rapid strides in all these areas, but it will still be
interesting to see how all these threats play out over the next few
years in this nascent industry.
Several concerns have centered on the lack of standards. The cloud
has been described as “a trap” by GNU creator and Free Software
Foundation founder Richard Stallman — one where companies like
Google will force customers into locked, proprietary systems that will
gradually cost more and more over time. It is therefore encouraging to
note that the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO)
technical committee for information technology has just announced
the formation of a new Subcommittee on Distributed Application
Platforms and Services (DAPS) that includes working a Study Group
for standardization of cloud computing, with the goal of pursuing
“active liaison and collaboration with all appropriate bodies…to
ensure the development and deployment of interoperable distributed
application platform and services standards in relevant areas.” More
informally, industry professionals have coalesced to form several
bodies like the Open Web Foundation (formed in 2008) that promote
the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications
for web technologies. Anticipating the backlash against
proprietary cloud computing platforms, cloud computing providers
are also proactively promoting standards. The recent formation of
EuroCloud (in 2009), backed by more than 30 leading cloud
computing vendors, to promote the development of standards in
cloud computing across the EU that coordinate with local issues at the
national level of individual countries is a welcome step. Even
individual providers have promoted standards — for example, Google
has formed the Data Liberation Front, an engineering team within
Google whose goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in
and out of Google products [55]; and Microsoft has recently filed a
patent for a method that promises to streamline the process of
moving from one cloud to another, and in many cases completely
automate the process [13].
Perhaps the biggest factor that will impede the adoption of the
cloud computing paradigm is regulation at the local, national, and
international level. Regulation can range from data privacy and data
access to audit requirements and data location requirements. When
corporate data are moved to the cloud, regulations such as SarbanesOxley
and the Health and Human Services Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) with their defined
requirements for physical data audit will come into play. Such and
other requirements at the local, national and international level (e.g.
many nations have laws requiring SaaS providers to keep customer
data and copyrighted material within national boundaries) might
negate many the benefits of cloud computing [14]. Regulation as an
issue that is important enough to warrant a separate discussion in
itself, and Section 7 is devoted to that discussion.