Is 2012 Your Year In The Cloud?

For many companies, cloud computing is still kind of a fuzzy concept. But the IT professionals tell us that 2012 is the year it will come into sharp focus. Many businesses will spend this year figuring out how the cloud make sense for them, and how to integrate it into their IT strategies. WNPR’s Harriet Jones reports.

As any user of web email can tell you, the cloud itself – just storing your personal data on a remote server - has been around for a long time. But the business services available through your browser are getting a whole lot more sophisticated and comprehensive. Matthew Lane works for Janus Associates, an information security consulting firm in Stamford. He says if there’s anyone the cloud makes sense for, it’s a start-up business.

“The old days if you want to start a company, the first thing you’d think of is that I’ve got to go out and buy a phone system, and I have to go out and buy a server, and I have to go buy workstations and I have to go buy network switches and I have to put wires in the wall. Now you don’t have to do that as much.”

Now he says, pretty much if you have a laptop and a cellphone, everything else is at your disposal.

“The storage, the applications, the network bandwidth -- everything can be purchased in the cloud, stored in the cloud.”

But he says, for those more established businesses that already have a big investment in their own IT hardware and staff, migrating to the cloud brings its own set of issues.

“If I’m a medium sized business and I want full control over my data, I need to have the data in my data center. If I don’t mind trusting a cloud provider, then I can put it out there. And that begs the question of how much risk am I willing to accept as a data owner for the cost benefit of not having to maintain a data center.”

That security question will loom large as cloud computing expands. But Tom Lang of Open Solutions, the software company based in Glastonbury, says if you look at any of the big data breach scandals of the recent past, they’ve typically involved the private infrastructure of corporations, or the theft of laptops -- none have implicated data in the cloud.

“The perception that things are less secure in the public cloud environment – just looking at media stories from the last five years debunks that.”

While many companies are looking to the cloud for limited services like data storage and management, some have seen the explosion of technology around cloud computing as a business opportunity in itself.

“So this is the main interface to our demo. We kind of show off the ability to track really different things...”

Jesse Youngblood is a software engineer at Queralt Inc in North Haven.

"....here we have Apple stock from a stock market; this is my sister's iPod Touch to make sure if anyone takes it, I know where it is, so we track GPS coordinates of iPhones; this is an active RFID tag that tracks doors...."

This company began life helping organizations to keep track of the movement of inventory or of expensive assets like computers with radio frequency tags. But now, using the availability of information in the cloud, the company can track whole new categories of sensory inputs and data points. GPS coordinates, video monitoring, smart phones, stock market numbers, weather sensors….

“Individually none of these things are that unique or that even interesting, but the combination of them is what really makes sense of things."

Software architect Steve Abbagnaro says the cloud allows Queralt’s systems to build up a history of data about the normal behavior of individuals and organizations and then issue an alert or an automatic reponse if an unusual pattern is detected.

"Jesse's laptop computer's showing, if his cellphone isn't in the same room his computer is, then don't unlock his computer. If this computer's taken out of the room, wipe its hard drive, because it can detect it's not allowed to leave this area. Triggering physical things -- locking a door, turning on a fan, emailing or notifying somebody nearby.  It's a global system."

“It’s huge. I think that it’s a game changer for us and for our customers.”

That’s Michael Queralt, the company’s co-founder. Queralt currently contracts with New Haven Public Schools to ensure laptop computers cannot be moved without permission. It’s also working on developing an application for the federal government.

“Homeland security is using it for managing physical access control to logical resources, which means – are you who you say you are? Are you in a location that I will allow you access to a certain logical resource, which could be a document, could be an application, could be a file.”

The company has test sites in healthcare to monitor the movement of elderly patients. Industrial clients also use the system to monitor in real time the safety of gas cylinders.

“For our customers, us being on the cloud allows them to get into new technologies and to really see the value of those technologies much faster, instead of deploying a lot of infrastructure and IT work within their environment.”

As more and more smart devices and sensors are able to relay information from the physical world and smarter computing power is able to process it in a meaningful way, companies like Queralt believe we may be only just touching the potential of the cloud.

For WNPR, I'm Harriet Jones.