cloud computing

An interesting story was published by the BBC that discusses the increased use of cloud services for storage and collaboration. The story is largely positive and highlights many of the benefits of the cloud, including flexibility and backup. The story advocates for careful evaluation of what people decide to put into the cloud and raises the issues of security and specifically “trust” in the service. The story includes a strong quote from Computerworld.com’s Marc Elgan:

"Services say give us all your data and use the applications from the internet, and don't worry about anything, we'll take care of the security. It's a value proposition based on you trusting the provider," he said.

"What we've learned recently is that no matter how trustworthy the provider is, it's never as secure or bullet proof as you might think it is," he added.

We believe that Marc’s advice is sound and encourage users of cloud services to expect stringent security and a service that can provide access to data offline. The entire BBC story can be found here: http://bit.ly/aGSuFB

Content Circles users are covered when it comes to security and privacy. Details about the strong security built into Content Circles can be found here: http://contentcircles.com/solutions/secure-file-transfer. We also believe that the Content Circles “private team cloud"/p2p hybrid model alleviates many of the specific concerns raised in the BBC story. The “private team cloud"/p2p model provides all the benefits of the cloud, but also has the benefit of keeping data local and password protected. Quite simply, we’re not asking for the level of trust that cloud services require. Your data always stays on your machines and is 100% encrypted during transfer among those machines. Plus, we offer offline access in the event of internet downtime.

What do you think – are cloud services asking for too much trust?

Last night I was notified by a customer that he wasn't able login into Content Circles. I immediately tried to login myself and found out that it was true. Our engineering folks then looked into the issue and found that our SSL certificate (for secure authentication of Content Circles users) expired yesterday. Our internet service provider did not inform us that it was expiring but it was completely our fault for not keeping track of the renewal date. We sincerely apologize to all of our customers for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Fortunately, Content Circles has the "work offline" mode which worked beautifully under the circumstance. When my client failed to login, it offered me the "work offline" option. I just had to type in my password and voila, I had access to all of my files. More importantly, I was able to connect with other people and work as if nothing went wrong, thanks to the power of Content Circles' hybrid cloud/p2p architecture! In essence, the system switched to a pure p2p mode (after authentication via re-confirming password) and allowed me to work while the cloud was down!!

This is our first major outage since we launched Content Circles in early 2009. Needless to say, I'm not happy about it at all. However, I'm very pleased the "work offline" mode worked as envisioned. Tommy Tam, one of our engineers, actually covered this feature of Content Circles in an earlier blog posting titled Outage in the cloud when Google and others were having outages. I re-read it today and I encourage you to read it as well.

In the meantime, rest assured we are working hard here to re-enable our "cloud" portion as quickly as possible.

Update 03/29/2010 12:25pm: Our SSL certificate has been renewed and we are back fully operational.

Two weeks ago, I attended IDC Directions 2010 event in Santa Clara. It was a very good event with many interesting presentations and panels. Frank Gens talk on cloud computing was particularly interesting as it relates to what we do at Content Circles. I thought I’d share some of Frank’s thoughts here.

First Frank re-iterated what he said last year about cloud computing still being “in the chasm” and that it still has ways to go before it will be widely adopted, especially by enterprises. I think we all agree with this but the most interesting parts of Frank’s presentation were IDC’s enterprise survey results that give a clear indication of what enterprises expect from cloud computing. Key results are summarized below:

Top 3 “benefits” of cloud/on-demand model:

• Pay only for what you use
• Easy/fast to deploy to end-users
• Monthly payments

Top 3 “challenges/issues” of the cloud/on-demand model:

• Security
• Availability
• Performance

Top 3 “services” expected of cloud service providers:

• Competitive pricing
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Option to move ‘cloud’ offerings back on premise

I was pleasantly surprised at these survey results because finally a reputed research firm such as IDC confirmed what was behind our thinking – in fact, we took a hybrid cloud/p2p approach to implementing Content Circles service to precisely address the 3 “challenges/issues” listed above! Of course, we provide the "benefits" and "services" listed above as well.

I was also enthused to see “option to move cloud offering back on premise” (or what Frank called a “private cloud”) as a key service expectation of enterprises going forward. Once again, we envisioned this requirement as well and built the “Content Circles Store-and-Forward Service” for on-premise enterprise deployment.

Frank went on to predict big rise in demand for “private cloud” offerings going forward starting in 2010. I think Frank is right and 2010 is going to be the year of the “private cloud”. What do you think?

Technology executives worldwide have convinced everyone that their products aren't really supposed to be reliable. If you disagree, read the warranty documents for almost any computing hardware, software or online solution. This has been going on for years. Microsoft Word, for example has been buggy since the day it was launched. It hasn't mattered what platform, operating system or version the application is running on top of.

Of course anyone paying attention has known this all along. From the massive power consumption of infinitely expanding server farms, to security breaches in bulletproof systems, we have all been chewing the technology gristle while the marketing guys told us it was steak. And as Lemmings, we just followed the technology talking heads….right off the cliff.

If I were reading this post from someone else, I would immediately go look at our warranty documents. Yep, similar to a lot of other companies out there. The standards for creating legal protections for your company are such that we would be foolish not to adopt the same language. Nonetheless we did not swallow the cloud hook.

"Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Screen"

We have all heard glowing stories about how customers are flocking to Gmail and Google Docs and running away from Microsoft Outlook and Office, because it was a flight to safety, security and reliability. The cloud-based applications were supposed to save us all because we no longer had to worry about the buggy operating system, PC or the applications that were installed on our machines. (psssst. All mobile, wireless and Internet Services Providers (ISPs) never go down, right?)

What the T-Mobile outage means for consumers

Google Postini Customers Fuming Over Outage

Google Outages Damage Cloud Credibility

What, hello, problems in fantasy land? In yet another example of "too big to fail" (see financial industry collapse of last year), it turns out there are storm clouds in cloud computing as well. And even though Larry Ellison ridicules Google's messaging around cloud computing as "nothing new" (he has been talking about "network computing" for years), the cloud computing hype cycle is running white-hot.

We don't buy the hype and we are not willing to settle for spin-therapy. Where are your key documents? How reliably can you gain access to them?

At Content Circles, we help companies take advantage of real team collaboration; and we don't pretend to do it for you. We help facilitate teams to share and track documents but we don't store the documents on our servers. We create and track metadata on what is happening to the files, such as sending, receiving, open, edit, check-out, check-in, etc. That information is always available to our customers and the documents always stay in your hands.

So let's review….Documents on your computer, on the computers of authorized members of your team, and your store and forward server……or uploaded to somewhere, mirrored to many other sites and all quite "secure"...Really?

You should have higher expectations and your vendors should follow through. We encourage you to give us a try if you haven't already.

Have an opinion? Let me know.

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

Ever wonder where your data really goes and who has access to it in cloud-based applications? The reality is that you can never be sure. Take the recent fiasco with Microsoft, T-Mobile and the Sidekick data that evaporated out of the cloud (pun intended). This episode reminded me of the famous Abbott & Costello routine of Who's on First: a true example of the blind leading the willing.

On a more serious note however, cloud-based vendors want everyone to believe that their applications are bulletproof and secure. With all of the examples of identity theft and corporate data loss out there, few actually believe this fantasy. If you don't control your data, you don't really know what is being done with (to) it.

That's why we took a completely different path at Content Circles. We believe that the most reliable place for your data to be is under your control at all times. We use peer-to-peer technology to move data directly between members of a work group. We don't take our customer's data and upload it to a random cloud-based application that then in turn gets mirrored to some unknown number of sites around the world.

Customers don't have to pay for someone else's bandwidth or storage, because they simply use the resources that are already available. Content Circles customers don't need IT support because the application is incredibly easy to use. Don't take our word for it: read what our customers have to say.

Give Content Circles a try with our free Personal Use Edition.

What do you think?

Sri Chilukuri
CEO
Content Circles

With all the hype these days around Cloud Computing, it is hard for people to remember there was a time before Amazon, Google, and Salesforce with their huge data centers and application hosting. It is also hard for people to believe there will be something after Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is not the solution to every problem. Users must ignore their inner voice and trust these remote applications and data centers are secure with their precious, private data. Users of Cloud Computing must accept they can only use the service when they are online. And one of the biggest flaws in Cloud Computing is the incredible power of the desktop being wasted by hosting a plain, old, kiosk browser. What we need is a way to bring the cloud to the desktop - to make it Fog Computing.

Content Circles enables Fog Computing with a rich-internet application (RIA) that integrates with your native applications to enable seamless content collaboration on documents. Instead of moving your favorite office, engineering, and creative applications to the cloud, Content Circles shares your local updates automatically with the other trusted members of your circles. Everyone gets a copy of the latest documents without having to download from the cloud and the files are stored locally so even when you are offline you have the most recent content with you. The service works both within and outside of corporate firewalls so there are no restrictions on who can participate in your circles for file sharing. And since everyone has a copy of the content, there is built-in backup/restore whenever someone loses their computer and must rebuild their circles.

For cases where not everyone is online at the same time, you can install Content Circles on a desktop that is always on as a store-and-forward. With this store-and-forward node as a member of a circle, it will always synchronize the latest content and will make it available to other members when they come online. In doing so, you still maintain complete control of your content without having to let it be hosted in the cloud, but still get the benefits of immediate synchronization when members of the circle come online.

By blending the best of Cloud Computing with the strength of the desktop, we feel Fog Computing with Content Circles is the best solution for team collaboration around content. Long live the Fog!

Gmail went down Tuesday...again.

Please don’t get me wrong, I do agree with cloud computing and we should move services into the cloud. However, services in the cloud, like Salesforce and Gmail, always have the chance of going offline. Users and developers are starting to realize this and solutions such as GeeMail are appearing to minimize the impact if Gmail goes offline.

We recognize that placing services in the cloud is insufficient to guarantee the accessibility of your information. It is important to provide the service to the user regardless of the status of the server in the cloud.

Therefore Content Circles enables users to work both online and offline. If the server in the cloud (which maintains user directory, stores content status, and handles email notifications) goes offline, users can continue to use Content Circles to share content with other members. Users can invite existing members to new circles, can add new documents or versions and synchronize with other members as long as the users are online.

When it is the user who is offline such as on an airplane, any changes they make will queue up in their local machine. Once the user goes online again, the changes will automatically be delivered to other members and the activities and emails pushed to the cloud. The Content Circles design eliminates the barriers for members to collaborate once they have established a trust relationship.

Without storing your content on the server in the cloud plus the ability to work offline and later synchronize changes back to other members once online, we believe Content Circles properly addresses the needs of content management for distributed teams. Members can continuously collaborate on their project, minimize wait time between versions, and have more time to focus on their actual business.

For the past decade, I’ve been working on content management systems (CMS), credit card payment systems (PCI), human resources systems, and customer relationship management systems (CRM). Most of them require a centralized server (either in the cloud or on an enterprise server), a thick client in some cases, and a series of technical requirements to make things secure. All these systems are trying to achieve a common goal – sharing information securely to allow collaboration.

In the CMS world (like EMC Documentum, Alfresco, and Xerox DocuShare) use SSL encryption to secure the transmission of the content. There are options in these systems to encrypt the content, but the content is still stored on the system. Eventually someone, such as a site administrator or content administrator, has access to the content and can potentially view the content. For instance, with a human resources management system, it is always a challenge for a manager to store employee information because the site administrator (usually not the manager) would have access to all the information.

In the credit card payment world, PCI compliance is strictly enforced - no customer credit card information can be stored. Every transaction in the payment system masks the credit card number, leaving only the last 4 digits, and ensures no one can get access to the credit card number. This is definitely a good solution for credit cards, but unfortunately it doesn’t work well if you want to share a secure word file with your insurance agent. It will not be human readable if we mask your presentation (well, unless your agent is a machine).

The common practice some users utilize nowadays is to zip up the content and encrypt the zip with a password. This makes transmission and storage secure, but the user still needs to send out the password (usually via email or IM), which is frankly the least secure of all. Or the user uploads the zip and encrypt content into the centralize system, such as Microsoft SharePoint. This approach involves multiple steps, and a user usually gives up using such a system to share information, switching back in few months with their favorite and most comfortable approach: email with attachments.

After more thought, we believe the most secure way is never store your content anywhere outside of your control. You only give specific people permission to your content and as long as you have secure transmission, the result is full control of your information - always.

A couple of colleagues and I have developed the best solution - Content Circles. We never store your content in the cloud and you have full control over who can access your content all the time. Your machine is source for sharing the files with other members of the circle. Sending large files or attachments is not an issue, because unlike email, the content is never stored on any server including the mail server. Content Circles also has connectors which help you to download, update, or publish existing content easily.

Agree or disagree? Please don’t hesitate to write a comment.