Horizon Report on Adoption of Cloud and Storage

The 2009 Horizon Report by New Media Consortium and Educause addresses trends and technologies that are emerging or promising to play a significant role in teaching or learning [3]. The report discusses technologies in timelines of adoption of one year, two to three years, and four to five years.

This blog discusses a one year emergent trend; cloud computing. According to the Horizon report, the trend is to make use of applications, storage, and compute power that is located on the Internet. The trend of cloud computing might require numerous technologies; those mentioned in the Horizon report include applications such as photo and video sharing and mathematic parallel computing.

The one year or less to adoption by the general populace appears accurate as evidenced in the thousands, perhaps millions, of people that use Flickr and U-Tube for photo and video repositories. The report suggests that cloud computing can and will be used in education and research and provides examples of the virtual computing lab at North Carolina State University and the cloud computing testing center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

The ability to use applications on the Internet by the general populace is clearly a viable entity of cloud computing. Evidence that storage resources will be used in research and teaching is not forthcoming in the report. Cloud storage resources must be shown to be secure and provide the necessary methods to ensure privacy and regulatory compliance of the data stored in the cloud before it is readily adopted. Storage resources must also be shown to be properly backed up so data availability is certain. The Horizon report does not address these issues that could well be barriers to adoption of cloud storage resources and move the adoption time by teaching institutions into the future. According to a Computerworld article on cloud storage, it is “wise to proceed with caution”, “few… businesses are willing to trust the cloud”, and some would “never entrust… data to an external cloud provider” [1]. As stated in NetworkWorld, “Enterprises also must consider the possibility that data could be stolen or viewed by people who are not authorized to see it.”, "Any time you let the data out of your computer room you're asking for trouble from a security point of view,", “a company's data could be stored next to a competitor's”, and as stated by Forrester analyst Reichman, “The storage industry isn't fully there yet with really secure multitenancy offerings," [2].

This author believes the road to adoption of cloud storage is more problematic than cloud applications and that research and teaching will take much longer than one year to adopt cloud storage.

[1] Mitchell, Robert L., Cloud storage triggers security worries. Computerworld Storage. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/340438/Confidence_in_the_Cloud

[2] Brodkin, John., Can you trust your data to Amazon, other storage cloud providers?. NetworkWorld. http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc3/051908-cloud-storage.html?page=3

[3] The Horizon Report 2009 Edition. New Media Consortium. wp.nmc.org/horizon2009