Posted by Joe Franscella –

Read an interesting blog post by Larry Dignan at ZDNet Between the Lines blog this morning, IBM targets Google Apps for business, undercuts pricing and touts reliability. One paragraph really caught my attention:

The LotusLive iNotes launch, set to be announced on Monday, pushes reliability in a big way. Taking a jab at Google’s outages, IBM said it’s imperative that cloud computing “is ready for the enterprise when it’s designed for the enterprise, by the enterprise, and of the enterprise.” Word of IBM’s iNotes move began to surface late Thursday and Big Blue has had a LotusLive iNotes site live for days.

It begs a couple questions: 1.) Who measures reliability? Do you leave that to that to the vendor or should you use a third-party app to provide a neutral perspective; 2.) What about seurity? How is access being managed, monitored and audited? (Note to Larry – Take a look at my email offer to provide some perspective – please, please, please!)

“There is hacking,” says Legge. “Hackers are coming after the electrical grid all the time.” (Ed Legge is pokesman for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), an association representing about 70 of the largest utilities which generate the bulk of the nation’s electricity through complex swatches of eastern- and western-distribution grids and management and control points called Independent System Operators)

What the security vendors said:

“The whole grid going down is the hardest one to believe,” says Eric Knight, senior knowledge engineer at Log Rhythm, noting the Wall Street Journal article lacked sufficient information “about why we should be panicking, per se.”

“This should come as a surprise to no one,” says Patrick Peterson, chief security researcher at Cisco, adding, “The truth is slowly coming out.”

Shane Buckley, CEO at Rohati, says he’s worries that “a number of utilities outsource development to Eastern Europe, Russia and China,” and cyberspy attacks could originate through outsourcing. (Disclaimer: I represent Rohati).

These stories hit hard and fast but I doubt they are over. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Network World’s Tim Greene launched his Cloud Security Alert newsletter today with a look at What is a cloud? Wrote Tim:

“So the cloud is a physical place, perhaps owned and controlled by some other entity, and it contains computing resources that are available pretty much on demand for a price. Simple enough, but there are plenty of variations.”

He goes on to explain it further, leaving the reader with a basic deffinition, something of value in today’s (excuse me for this nest description) “foggy cloud environment.”

In terms of cloud deffinitions, I also like the one in Gartner’s 2008 paper: Tutorial for Understanding the Relationship Between Cloud Computing and SaaS

In the paper, Gartner defines cloud computing as: a style of computing where massively scalable ITenabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. One IT-related function can be a software application. If the software application is written in such a way that it is “massively scalable,” then SaaS is considered a form of cloud computing (SaaS).

Posted by Joe Franscella