Nick Velich- Article Critique # 1

Nick Velich-- 9/22/2009

Recently I read an article which discussed the movement of U.S. government data from privately run servers to publicly run servers. ‘U.S. government sets up online app store’ was an article about the government setting up an online store, which they are now using and will continue to use in the future, in order to outsource their information to other services found online. By using online resources, instead of using privately built, funded, and maintained local servers, a company (in this case the government) can significantly lower the costs to upkeep their technology needs. The process of using the internet, as opposed to a local means of running services such as email servers and data storage servers, is called ‘cloud computing.’

A business can use the process of cloud computing to outsource their technology needs on existing information technology. In this article, for example, the government has planned to store much of their data on Google servers by 2010. By using already available IT, the cost of storing data is reduced greatly. Instead of building servers, training people to maintain them, and paying people to upkeep the servers, the government (and other companies alike) can simply use web services already available, such as Google or YouTube, in order to satisfy their needs at a lower cost.

The downside to using these public servers is obvious, however. When a company maintains their own servers, they reduce third party interference and their data is more private. By storing data privately on a public application, the data is still secure (to an extent), but is under control of the company that is storing that data. There must be steps taken to ensure that the data stored is still as secure as privately stored data; encryption of the data is the easiest solution to this but is an extra step in which something could go wrong, such as data loss.

In my opinion, I agree with what the government is doing by using cloud computing to lower their costs of storing data and running applications. By doing this publicly instead of privately they are lowering costs and in the long-run it will be good for the United States. As IT grows and more resources become available, it is vital that companies take advantage of anything to cut costs and improve efficiency.

My main concern, however, with the government increasing its use of cloud computing is that the process could progress too quickly. The government is such a large ‘firm’ that I fear the amount of data could overwhelm individual companies, such as Google. Google would have to ensure that their servers are ‘up-to-speed’ in order to handle this massive influx of new data. Smaller companies can easily utilize apps like Flickr or Gmail because the individual apps are certain to be able to handle smaller scale operations.

In addition to overwhelming the public servers, the transfer of data between the current government servers and the Google servers could lead to other issues; whenever data is transferred between two physical locations, there is always the risk of data corruption or loss. I believe that utilizing this new IT is vital, but the switch should not be instantaneous. At first, both the public and private servers would need to run simultaneously in order to guarantee that the data is accurate; this, of course, increases the costs of the company at first, but in the long-run would reduce costs. Until the integrity of the data is ensured, neither the government, nor any smaller company, should switch without first addressing whether or not their data is practical for a publicly run server, and whether the switch can be done without too much hardship. If this migration from private servers to publically run servers is taken with care, then in the end cloud computing is a productive use of information technology.

Article found at http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/16/government.app.store/index.html