Cloud Computing

At Best Buy, cloud computing has taken so much of the cost and risk out of launching new applications that it’s turned the entire process upside down, says Gary Koelling, the company’s senior manager for social technology. Ideas that used to require months of pitching and planning now don’t even need manager approval and can be up and running in a matter of weeks.

The change is freeing employees to pursue ideas such as the Best Buy Idea Exchange, a Web site where customers can share, vote on, and discuss ideas for improving Best Buy. The site launched just six weeks after Koelling’s team decided to pursue it. It’s hosted in Amazon’s cloud. It’s possible that in-house hosting for the site would have cost 10 times as much, Koelling says, but more likely, it never would have seen the light of day.

At least a half-dozen higher-profile Best Buy applications are running in either Google or Amazon clouds, from its employee social-network site Blue Shirt Nation to the iPhone app it launched earlier this summer.

Security Concerns

Companies have hesitated to place more sensitive data such as health or financial records in the cloud, and their concerns aren’t without merit. Highly regulated companies using cloud services will face extra hurdles, and right now, some of those hurdles might be insurmountable or not worth the hassle.

“For the most part, the cloud is going to be more secure than what you can provide in your own IT infrastructure,” says George Reese, author of Cloud Application Architecture, a book for developers and systems administrators, and owner of Minneapolis-based EnStratus, which provides tools that help businesses manage resources in the cloud. “[Amazon is] going to have the policies and procedures in place that 90 percent of companies may talk about doing but don’t really do.”

The most immediate barrier for most companies may be emotional. “The lack of control creates a perceived reduction in security,” Reese says. It’s like feeling less safe riding in the passenger seat with a friend at the wheel, even if she’s a better driver than you are.

No uniform standards exist for security in the cloud. “Just because Amazon is particularly good with protecting your data doesn’t mean that Joe’s Cloud Company is going to be good with protecting your data,” Reese says.

And there is a risk when your data is stored on a server that is shared by multiple customers. The data will be inaccessible to other customers. But if, for example, someone whose data is on the same server is subpoenaed, your data could conceivably wind up in the hands of lawyers, Reese explains.