Private Cloud – Knight in Shining Armor

Von Protonet Team. Veröffentlicht 27. Februar 2012.

Cloud Services and their beginning.

Remembering the German Windows 7 TV commercial from 2010, Microsoft wanted to explain their cloud service Windows Live; a mother wants to edit a family photo. “Up in the Cloud” she says in German, apparently needing the cloud to edit the picture. She takes a part of one photo and puts it into another, resulting in a nice family picture. Either the viewer asked them self why she needed the cloud to do that or they were confused as to what this cloud is supposed to be all together.

Nowadays cloud computing is pretty much used everywhere, privately and job-related. Applications go from emails and calendars, customer relationship management and many more to backups in the cloud. The named advantages of cloud services are cost savings, flexibility, agility, security against data loss, focus on other things, scalability and collaboration (link). According to Interxion (300 interviewees in Europe) almost 70 percent of European companies have set cloud computing as one of their priorities, 76 percent use cloud services already or at least plan to in near future.

Cloud services have been around for a while, dropbox raised a seven digit figure of funding back in 2007 in the US, round here in Germany it became popular rather late – at least as far I’m concerned. Dropbox probably is that service in Germany that explains cloud computing best to most: Save data somewhere and access from everywhere.

Clouds downsite: Data Security

Dropbox, just like box.net, Google, Amazon, Microsoft or other big players in online data storage and sharing, are US companies. Consequently their servers are mostly located outside Germany and outside Europe. Dropbox uses the Amazon simple storage service (s3). The only European Amazon servers are in Ireland, same with Microsoft. Google has a rather distributed server landscape. Independently of the physical location of the data, American companies are subject to American laws. (Data) privacy is not such a big issue in the US as it is in Germany, see privacy discussion of Facebook as one example (German article). To make matters worse there is the US Patriot Act that allows public authorities to reveal data from customers of US American companies.

The newly appearing idea of the “personal cloud” doesn’t change the data security concerns, although one might think so by the name. Personal clouds allow access to applications from any device, but you don’t keep the data personally. Most use the personal cloud already, for example when synchronizing e-mails on mobile phone, desktop pc and laptop or when using services such as dropbox.

Advantages of Private Clouds

However, there is help (described by another buzz word): private cloud. Applications etc. are taken in-house onto internal company computers. This actually solves the problem since the data stays in-house. Private clouds bring all the advantages described above such as everywhere access, backup service and so on without the downside of data insecurity. Not only companies with data privacy policies and requirements benefit from private clouds, it also suits all businesses with high privacy standards. Usually there is a high cost  for such a set up taking into account computer centres and administration. Adequately, the guiding theme of this year’s CeBIT is “Managing Trust”. After “Work & Life with the Cloud” in 2011, security and safety in the digital world is the logical next step.

Protonet is on track to provide “private clouds” for small enterprises. Low costs, barely administration efforts and transparency are the promises of protonet, keeping all advantages and usability of the own it-infrastructure. You can find us at CeBIT in the betahaus coworking-area in the convention center (cc) outside hall 2. There we will provide the wireless network and present our product and service.