One of the current hot topics in many technology circles concerns the cloud-computing model.  Wikipedia has the following definition for cloud computing:

a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.

One of the biggest criticisms and concerns with this approach is the ownership, integrity, and security of the data.  At work we are struggling with this concept as well.  We are investigating moving our student e-mail into either Microsoft’s or Google’s online mail model.  From an economic approach it seems very cut-and-dried.  If we move the data for our users into the cloud then we cut down on our data storage, server and basic infrastructure costs.  However, the legal ramifications of this are interesting.

Faculty and staff data are to be kept inside the enterprise due to concerns over the possibility that their mail would contain confidential or sensitive data, such as grade information, student id numbers, etc.  What is interesting is that if a student is the recipient of an e-mail from a faculty or staff member that contains this information then the confidential or sensitive data has been placed in the cloud whether or not the faculty or staff member wanted it that way.

I have been dealing with this in a small way myself while trying to decide if I should move all of my personal mail into Google (which already hosts my mail accounts using the Google Apps services).  Do I rely on the large scale backup and storage of Google?  At first I was concerned that I might loose connectivity during a rare outage of the GMail system.  But I realized that I only check my mail using a full client on my machine at home.  Everywhere else I rely on an imap connection or the web interface.  So I have made the leap!

Now to work on making my GPG signature stuff work with GMail’s web interface.