Cloudy thoughts

By Jianggan Li | 23 June 2009 | Permanent link | 0 comments

A day doesn’t go by without ‘cloud computing’ appearing multiple times in the news. It is unnecessary for me to repeat what has been said (potentially many times), but here are some of my random thoughts about how cloud computing matters to readers of FutureGov. As you can see, they are quite tangential:

• At the moment, I can’t see much (actually, any) difference between cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).


• Conventional definition of cloud computing also includes ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ and ‘Platform as a Service’, but I guess only SaaS is particularly relevant in our context.


• Cloud computing is a nice name though, in a world infested with nerdy acronyms.


• Government prefers a private cloud – mixing government data with other information in a public cloud is not desirable; the security and reliability implications are not reassuring.


• But a specific agency needs to be handling the cloud services, just like the case with centralised data centres.


• I don’t believe desktop cloud services (such as Gmail) can be easily replicated to government scale – the environment would be much more complicated and very different.


• Education maybe – where budget is often limited and criticality doesn’t match that of the government? Google has already had some success in that sector.


• Netbooks will become more appealing with more educational services allowed in the cloud – of course only in places where a reasonably high-speed internet connection is guaranteed.


• In remote rural areas, the cost of such connection is still prohibitive.


• Therefore I sincerely hope cloud computing can be a catalyst for more widespread WiMAX (or equivalent standards).


• With the cloud model (and a good connection), rural students will be able to enjoy the same IT learning experience as their counterparts, not the scaled-down or dated version – and hopefully with a reduced cost.


• It is also appealing to healthcare organisations, especially in sharing medical records (including clinical images) and access clinical management systems. With healthcare organisations more concerned about data security and privacy than governments, probably only private clouds would make sense.


• Small hospitals and clinics who can’t afford secure data centres or desktops will benefit from potential cloud services, with health authorities or the government taking the lead.


• Personal Health Record is also an area cloud will be and must be interesting.


• However policies are incomplete or inexistent in most countries on how PHRs should be governed and who should own those records.


• And in Asia, many healthcare organisations are still working on setting up EMR and deploying clinical systems. PHR seems distant.