In these globalised times nationalism has become a pejorative term. But the emergence of cloud computing has already bumped up against the reality of borders in the form of national laws and data protection.

The cloud makes financial sense, if it can take away 70% of IT spend. It might actually mean better security. It means less administration.

That’s all on the plus side. But concerns remain.

In a session at the recent data center summit by analyst company Gartner, Jan Stoetzel, head of service marketing at Fujitsu Technology Solutions gave a presentation on the trustworthiness of cloud computing.

Private and trusted or mega and public
To Stoetzel, as to many others, cloud computing can be broken into the public mega cloud and private trusted clouds. Whereas previous service delivery scenarios were premised on bespoke managed services and standardized managed services, the cloud offers off premises data center based infrastructure and services, he said. As with Amazon's EC2, Gartner says these services must be ‘elastic.’

This split, between private and public, is a major issue. For example, Stoetzel said, current Fujitsu public sector clients will only accept 100% private cloud based storage. The implication is that public sector clients will always want to know where their data physically resides. To be a supplier of cloud services means having the data center infrastructure on a geographical basis to service the applications.

Fujitsu, he said, has 80 data centers from which services can be offered. However if this is projecting the image of a pay as you go application offering that is billed on a usage basis then the reality is somewhat more grounded. Fujitsu is currently offering storage as a service and plans to bring to market a ‘server as a service’ offering in November. Hosting enterprise applications in the cloud on behalf of large companies is some way off.

Google's cloud delivery model

Take me to your apps
Not so for Google. In the week that global hygiene firm Rentokil Initial signed a ‘landmark’ deal to shift 20,000 users to Google Apps premier edition which will see it moving off 180 existing email domains and 40 mail systems running on six operating systems, a presentation at the Storage Expo conference in London saw Xen Lategan, Technical Lead UK/IE/Benelux region at Google describe how the company is building its enterprise cloud offerings from the ground up.

Naturally, it all starts in the data center.

Lategan says Google’s cloud offering consists of massive data centers, a cloud operating system , applications engineering and enterprise engineering. The Google team of cloud engineers add security, granularity and access, he says. When addressing some of the concerns raised by customers about moving to the cloud and the types of questions that lie ahead, Lategan said that Google could offer enterprise customers the ability to stay within a region.

David Day, CTO at Zeus Technologies, a supplier of traffic management tools says: ‘Some cloud providers will let you place your data in a specific geographical location. You are then able to apply business logic to the process of moving to the cloud and ensure compliance with the kind of regulations you are trying to meet. You can still take advantages of the economies of scale and still get agility to make sure that you can get the benefits. I don’t think it is going to be a big issue.’

Research commissioned by Zeus found that 53% (of 100 European and 100 US based CIOs) believe that introducing government standards and legislation to control clouds would boost adoption rates. Clearly there remain concerns about data protection and security.

State of the Nation?
In its annual report for 2008 – published in September 2009 – the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said: ‘The principle of cloud computing presents a real challenge for a proper identification of the applicable law related to the processing of personal data, the responsible actors and other legal consequences involved… The following example illustrates the flexibility which could be offered by cloud computing,but also the issues it triggers for the enforcement of the EU legal framework. In order to lower energy cost, cloud-processing activities might be directed primarily to data centres, which are powered by solar energy and under the sun at the time of the request for processing; those located momentarily on the dark side of the Earth and functioning with other energy could be less accessed. Although environmentally attractive, this example also shows that it would be almost impossible to define where the processing will take place and by which actors of the cloud. It is also possible to envisage that personal data stored in third country data centres could be subject to subpoena and disclosed to the government of the jurisdiction where the cloud computing servers are located.

One possible solution which has already been suggested would be to force personal data to be processed and stored only in ‘EU cloud’ servers which are physically located on the EU territory and under the EU data protection regulatory framework. But this constraint would go against the foundations of a promising technology and the great flexibility and adaptability cloud computing is supposed to offer.’

Take me to your data center
While the EDPS's grasp of data center technology is limited, the reality is that the concerns need not be restricted to conditions involving solar powered data centers - if such things could exist.

The real questions being raised are whether we will see the emergence of regional or National Clouds in addition to the Public and Private clouds already identified.

Offering cloud services across borders is not simply a question of having the data centers and the technology to do so. National laws and international conventions will also have a major impact.

While it may not affect Rentokil, (Motorola and car systems maker Valeo were also cited as Google cloud customers) - public sector and heavily regulated industries will remain wary of moving applications and data into and around the cloud.

As Fujitsu’s Stoetzel says, it is up to enterprises to calculate their own risks of moving to the cloud. For many, knowing in which data center their information is sitting will be vital.

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