Lots of discussion at present on the move to “cloud computing.” While I can count the Software as a Service applications (Saas) in use at TRU on one hand, Gartner predicts that, by 2012, a third of all corporate computing spend will be SaaS subscriptions. Okay so this is going to be big. The increased visibility on the CO2 emissions and costs to run local data centres will only accelerate this move of software applications to cloud.

But thinking ahead what happens when we’ve moved everything to the cloud and turned our data centre into offices? Like manufacturing and call-centres before it, the “cloud” will no doubt find its way to the cheapest place to provide the service. With the ease of virtualization, that corporate application that used to require servers and kilowatts and TLC in the basement can now run anywhere, even multiple places, at any time. I used to think that the Cloud Architecture would be simple and relatively benign, that these few, large”non-evil” companies knew what was best for you and your data. But Bill Thompson has other ideas and sees the rise of the cloud more like a miasma as corporations and governments have other plans for your info.

“In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.

If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else – apart from their lawyer – about it.The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, more than 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.”

More on the dark side later. Happy Canada Day!