Under the Cloud

The business world is almost as fad-ridden as the education world, and one of the hot words in the last few years is "cloud" as in "I'll get it from the cloud," or "We put all our data on the cloud."  In this sense, the word means a set of Internet servers where your important data is archived so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an Internet connection.  The concept is increasingly vital to commercial and institutional users worldwide, and makes sense in that context.  But as Scientific American columnist David Pogue warns in the February issue, Apple and Microsoft are taking not-so-subtle steps to force many individual users of their products onto the cloud.  And I doubt that anyone reading this column can avoid using Apple and Microsoft products without a lot of inconvenience. 

The situation, as I understand it, is basically this:  suppose you have data that needs continual updating on your portable gizmo (which can be an iPad, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, one of those Android things, or you name it), and you'd also like the same version of the same data on your laptop.  In the old days, whenever you made changes on your calendar, for example, you would then physically plug your portable device through a USB cable or whatnot into your laptop and tell it to sync.  That way, your laptop calendar would agree with your handheld thingy's calendar and vice versa, and you wouldn't find yourself at Aunt Mimi's when you were supposed to be having your teeth cleaned.  So far, so good.

Then the number of handheld devices proliferated, and so did their operating systems, and so did the ways you can have laptops and towers talk with portable systems (wireless, IR, Bluetooth, etc.), and at least according to the manufacturers and their unofficial representatives, it just got to be too hard to come up with proprietary software to sync absolutely every portable thingamajig with each operating system for all the popular computers.  So they just said forget it:  the real data will sit on the cloud, where we can keep track of it, and then all we have to do is make sure that every piece of hardware (portable or not) can keep in touch with the cloud.  And that solved the problem. . . .

But if you were used to firing up your old laptop and plugging it into your BlackBerry that you've had since 2003, and you are dead-set against keeping your data in a place that you know not where and you know not when it might go down, you are now out in the cold and under the cloud, so to speak.  According to Mr. Pogue, the latest operating systems from both Apple and Microsoft either don't allow you to do hard-wired transfers without involving the cloud, or make it so hard to do that you almost have to get a networking certificate from Microsoft to know how to do it. A discussion thread on an Apple forum on exactly this topic has been going on since last October, and has accumulated 150 pages of comments.  So there are more than a few people upset about this.

Call me Amish, but it doesn't affect me because my form of a BlackBerry is a three-by-five card.  Or rather, many three-by-five cards.  I suppose if you took all the three-by-five cards I've used in the last decade and piled them up, they would make a stack high enough to fall over and form the kind of mess my desk looks like some days.  In fact, that may be why. . . anyway, somehow I have survived thirty years of an occasionally intense professional life with nothing more advanced than a laptop or two and a mobile phone that you still have to use the numeric keypad for to send a text.  It's so annoying to do it that way that I hardly ever send texts, which is all right by me. 

But seriously, this specific issue is an example of a more general trend that organizations are following: a move toward exerting increasing control of any computer that is connected to one of their networks.  For example, I spend some time at the University of Texas at Austin.  If I was using a University-provided laptop (which I'm not, as it turns out), I would now have to make sure that all the data on it was encrypted in accordance with a University-provided type of encryption software so that if it happens to get stolen, the thieves can't run off with University data.  That makes sense from a liability and security point of view—I have blogged on numerous scandals and crimes that happened when someone took home a laptop full of supposedly secure data—but it represents another intrusion, if you will, into a space that was formerly rather private. 

Of course, if the University owns the laptop, they get to say what you can and can't do with it.  Privately owned computers connected to privately rented networks are another matter, but then you still have to deal with Apple or Microsoft, and their pressure to keep your stuff on the cloud will prove irresistible.  The Star Trek Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, liked to say "resistance is futile," but that was only a TV show.   

Personally, I don't see any real harm in letting Microsoft know the details of my next dental appointment.  And yes, those massive servers go down from time to time, but then so does your laptop.  I admit that I would feel a certain kind of existential queasiness in entrusting the only record of my professional schedule to some ethereal system that is everywhere and nowhere, rather than having it in a tangible, solid form on pieces of paper in my appointment calendar in my briefcase.  (Yes, I do that the old-fashioned way too.)  Maybe people living in the 1850s felt the same way about the newfangled electromagnetic telegrams, and didn't really trust them on an instinctive level as much as they would trust a letter written by the hand of a friend they knew.  But they got used to trusting telegrams, and I suppose we will get used to trusting the cloud, as long as our trust is not abused. 

Sources:  The online version of David Pogue's article "The Curse of the Cloud" can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/were-forced-to-use-cloud-services-but-at-what-cost/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on BlackBerry and Borg (Star Trek). 

To Cloud or Not To Cloud?

The other day I was working in my lab with a new student, and we ended up with a lot of image data to transfer from his laptop to mine.  Because I personally date back to the days when computer data was transferred by means of a stack of paper IBM-type punch cards, my first thought whenever I want to move or store lots of data is to resort to some physical medium:  a hard drive or flash (USB) drive, typically.  But my student proposed using a service called Dropbox.  To use it once it was installed, all he had to do was to put the data in a file on his computer.  The software sent it over the Internet to some data center somewhere, and then sent the stuff to be downloaded to my computer where I could access it in a similar file.  And it was free, at least for the first two gigabytes of data.

Dropbox is an example of “cloud computing”:  the dispersal of computing resources onto the Internet, instead of localizing your computer power in a physical box or boxes at your site.  Radioastronomers came up with one of the earliest cloud-computing applications I’m aware of, when they wrote an application to process raw data produced by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).  If you wanted your computer to help in the SETI search in its spare time, you just downloaded their app and could take comfort in the knowledge that you were one of hundreds of people all over the country helping SETI look for extraterrestrials.

Nowadays, of course, cloud computing is a big deal business-wise, as companies recognize that outsourcing a lot of their IT needs makes more sense than trying to maintain their own physical system with all the hassles that involves.  But I wasn’t aware of the ethical implications of cloud computing until I came across an article by Dunstan A. Hope and  Ryan Schuchard on greenbiz.com, an Internet publication for businesses interested in being more environmentally conscious.

It turns out that the “cloud” is, of course, no airy nothing floating around in the ether, but consists of servers, processors, power supplies, cooling systems, and (a few) maintenance personnel concentrated in “data centers” whose locations are not always public knowledge.  It’s understandable for security reasons that companies who run these centers aren’t just posting their addresses everywhere, but their geographic anonymity makes it easy to assume that the cloud really is a cloud, and has no needs for space, electricity, water, or other resources.  It’s a little like things were back before we started being environmentally conscious in general:  when you threw something away in those innocent times, you didn’t give a second thought to where “away” was.  But now we know better, or at least we should.

Large data centers run by outfits such as Google use so much power that they are located near sources of abundant cheap energy.  One estimate by the Environmental Protection Agency says as much as 1.5% of the U. S. electric power output is used by data centers.  This can be hydroelectric energy, such as The Dalles, Oregon’s Columbia River power, or coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.  It’s an open question, as far as I know, whether it’s more energy-efficient for 100 businesses to use the cloud-computing services of one data-center operation, or for them all to have their own computers in their own locations.  I suspect if the data center is run with an eye toward energy efficiency, it may be better energy-wise to use the cloud.  A new trend in data centers is to build them in arctic areas so that you can use natural cooling (basically running with the windows open, so to speak) even in the summer, rather than pay for expensive refrigeration machinery to cool the systems in hot weather.  But there are not that many arctic areas with abundant cheap energy, so there are problems with this idea too.

Besides the notion of energy conservation, there is the question of security.  I confess to an atavistic feeling that the best measure of security for my data is if I can hold its physical embodiment in my hands:  a flash drive, a hard drive, or a laptop where the data is physically stored.  But realistically, a better way to protect against data loss is to hand it to professionals who put it on multiply-backed-up remote servers such as the Dropbox people or many other Internet services provide.  I suppose some malevolent malware-writer could cause a wipeout of the data stored in an entire cloud-computing service’s files, but it would be hard, and not nearly as likely as a hard-drive crash on one individual’s computer.  I always keep backups, but backups can fail too, and there’s the bother of keeping track of the media, updating it as it goes to legacy status, and so on.  So cloud computing makes sense from a data-security standpoint.

Besides physical security, there is the question of somebody stealing data or otherwise gaining unauthorized access to it.  The banks have dealt with this type of problem since the first bank began using the first computer, and while Americans are notoriously sensitive about breaches of their personal financial data, nobody much seems bothered by the fact that your personal financial information is stored in scattered places around the country.  Of course, not all cloud-computing firms have security as good as bank data systems, but at least the precedent is there.  So I’m not so concerned about this aspect of cloud computing.

Whatever the ethics of the trend, it looks like cloud computing will be in our future more as time goes on.  If you use a cloud-computing service, you can make an effort to find out what their Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating is.  This is the ratio of the total power used by the facility divided by the power actually needed by the computing equipment.  A lower number (lower than 2) is better.  And if they provide such information, find out where their data servers are, and what kind of power they use.  Even if it’s billed as a free service, somebody’s paying for electricity somewhere, and you might as well be responsible enough to find out about it.

Sources:  The article “Cloud computing raises new ethics, sustainability issues” appeared at http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/04/11/ethics-cloud-computing?page=0%2C0 and was written by Dunstan Allison Hope and Ryan Schuchard.  I referred to the articles on data centers and The Dalles on Wikipedia.  And I use Google’s cloud-computing service blogspot.com to post this blog, although I always keep a copy on my laptop!