Features

Published February 2010

Learning in the Cloud

Agatha Gilmore

Continued

For starters, NIST cites a 2008 study by IDC that asked participants to rate challenges ascribed to the “cloud” model on a scale of one to five, with one being “not significant” and five being “very significant.” About 75 percent of respondents ranked security a four or five, making it the No. 1 concern. This was followed by performance (63.1 percent), availability (63.1 percent), difficulty in integrating with in-house IT (61.1 percent), difficulty in bringing services back in-house (50 percent) and regulatory requirements that prohibit or limit cloud computing (49.2 percent).

In August 2009, Educause, a nonprofit that works to advance higher education through the use of information technology, published an article in which it said cloud computing “introduces significant concerns about privacy, security, data integrity, intellectual property management, audit trails and other issues.”

“A lot of those are legit,” Cross said. But he added that researcher and author Andrew McAfee has asked hundreds of companies about their primary fears in engaging in cloud computing. Respondents reported fearing that “somebody’s going to give away company secrets or that somebody’s going to criticize the company, or give advice on legal or medical matters, and that’s going to go public,” Cross said. “He searched far and wide and he hasn’t found anyone who has had this happen. It’s a myth.”

That said, companies can proactively work to mitigate potential security issues by developing and implementing a formal policy on cloud computing.

“There’s a danger if there’s not a well-understood policy and culture around what’s secret and what’s not,” Cross said. “Even if [companies] figure, ‘We don’t allow any of this stuff,’ they still better have a policy.”

To create a truly effective policy, however, learning professionals first must envision the big picture.

Moul emphasized that there is no cutting corners on that. “I don’t think any technology shortcuts the need to understand your road map and your framework of how you want your business to run and how the applications need to work together,” he said.

In fact, since cloud computing is still relatively new, the integration piece itself could pose a challenge. Moul said about 75 percent of Boomi’s clients have some applications running in the cloud and some running on-site, meaning they need to find a way to allow all of these programs to communicate with each other.

Further, “some enterprise organizations have controls about what you can install on a machine, so that can be a challenge,” Knox said. “Again, you should do a trial to find out if there are any kinks you need to iron out.”

Filley said Lombardi Software encountered this issue when trying to deliver virtual learning via the cloud.

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