The 3 issues of cloud computing

3 issues of cloud computing

One of the problems of cloud computing is how safe your client's feel knowing that you can view their data if it is loaded onto your servers. There is nothing I can do about this viewing problem, except to say that even if a client has the application loaded locally their feelings of security are largely misplaced. Most programmers would know how to transfer every bit of that data to some remote site. The relationship of client to application supplier is essentially one of trust.

Another problem with cloud computing that if your company name isn't Amazon or Google, well nobody is going to feel safe having all their data in your cloud. What if your company disappears? One final issue with cloud computing is that if a client needs to interface their data with other in-house systems.
It turns out these last 2 issues can be solved in 1 fell swoop. Data replication.

What is required is that the client runs a process that polls the server, and downloads any changes to a local database. One key to this solution is that every record on the server needs a modification timestamp. Then it is relatively easy for the local polling service to request all changes since ????. This is how the problem at http://www.freightfreedom.com/ was solved. The last pieces to the puzzle was to make it cross-platform, and to abstract the database layer so that the client could choose the database to store the local data into.

So the solution is data replication, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.