Trust plays a central role in a company’s willingness to migrate services to the cloud – despite the cloud’s financial benefits. The traditional question usually expresses the tension as follows: how much control is your company relinquishing by allowing a service to manage your most valuable information in hosted data centers, as opposed to in hardware or servers on premise? But Josh Bernoff takes a new angle on this issue in Groundswell’s marketing blog.
Bernoff begins by extending the question of cloud services to a broader application. For example, in one’s personal household management, the acceptance of eliminating paper bills in favor of the more eco-friendly online payments is widespread. In fact, Bernoff brings in this case to demonstrate the advantage of billing online over housing all of one’s paperwork in file cabinets. Whereas all of his online bills are easily available on citibank’s website, the paper bills are much harder to keep track of. And, despite Bernoff’s trust that citi was keeping careful records of his paper bills as well, this in fact was not the case beyond a six month history. Bernoff’s example drives home the point for me, albeit a little too convincingly for my own confidence, but I would imagine that in this instance I am not alone among household managers.
The blog’s last point repositions the responsibility of trustworthiness on the companies providing the Internet based services. If cloud services want businesses to migrate their services to the cloud, then they must back up the offers with completely trustworthy options.
Google has taken this call to action pretty seriously. In an article on eweek.com on Dec. 30, 2009, Google’s VP of Product Management, Bradley Horowitz, comments on the steps that Google Voice is taking in their efforts to cultivate user trust, and business users in particular. The steps include “unveiling the Data Liberation Front to let users export the data created within users’ Google Apps to apps outside Google’s purview” and having “launched the Google Dashboard to let users see exactly how much data they were creating within Google to host.”
A cnet Q&A with Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, from the end of Oct. 2009, also sheds an interesting perspective on this discussion:
You are big advocates of cloud computing. I’ve run into a lot of skepticism here at the show chiefly because of trust issues. What do you need to do to make your cloud-based services trustworthy enough and secure enough that a lot of big businesses will embrace them?
Schmidt: There are some businesses that will never embrace them. For purposes of argument that will be 1 percent. They’ll conclude they want absolute control and are willing to pay a premium for that. What is that? Their own data centers, their own security architecture, their own risk management, and so forth. The vast majority, for purposes of argument 99 percent, will conclude that the analogy about the ATM machine is correct. Eventually the convenience of using ATM machines and the bank outweighs carrying the money around with you. Initially you think, “How do I trust the bank?” You work out the problems and (eventually) people have enough experience to know even if there is a problem it will be fixed.In our case, the uptime of our servers and services appears to be higher than that of corporate services. When you study the reliability, we’re trying to get to four nines (99.99 percent availability). Most corporate IT departments are not at that level.
Josh Bernoff and Eric Schmidt are really saying the same thing. When framing the question of reliability in cloud computing, cloud telephony, or any cloud service for that matter, the dilemma should not solely describe a tradeoff between cost/speed/accessibility and trust. The tradeoff is also between the trust of two different parties. Does the on-premise hosting of a service or application really provide more trust than a cloud based alternative?
[Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net]
Related posts:
- Earning Trust
- Build Trust by Setting an Example
- End of the Year Thoughts about Cloud Computing… and Cloud Telephony
- Analogies of the Clouds – Cloud Telephony: Cloud Computing
- Question of the Month: Did Apple Really Reject Google Voice?
