It is extremely important to take notice of what exactly is happening in cloud computing world. When cloud computing was first proposed, the main objective was to ease the process of installing physical datacentres local to each user. Huge corporations and business often need relatively large infrastructure to manage, store and deliver the data from its sources. However, to decrease the need to invest in this kind of infrastructure, Cloud computing was proposed. Today, the actual meaning of the native cloud computing is slowly vanishing, as the rules and regulations grows stricter. Many analysts also feel that this may eventual lead to data fragmentation.
Cloud computing is getting bigger but complicated too:
From the early stages of cloud to today, the services which came forward to support cloud only increased. Today’s cloud clients have myriad of services to choose from and all those services provide unimaginable number of subscriptions with various price plans. From a small enterprise to huge businesses, cloud has been the ultimate solution for data storing and data serving. Cloud will only get bigger, not smaller. If that is the case, we should be seeing higher rates of data serving. But that is not happening in many countries.
Many cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or IBM cloud, build data centres all around the world. When some data comes from a cloud service, the country of origin should be anonymous to the end user. But increasing government concern in security risks due to applications originated from hostile countries in the name of national security is restricting the users to access the applications. Also, some of the cloud service providers are obliged to store the data inside the same country as the cloud client, so that data can be scrutinized, and national threats can be neutralized.
Cloud services native to the country
To understand what is happening precisely, let’s take an example. If a US based cloud service has been subscribed by a European based business. The company’s data is synced all over the world, in all the datacentres. This is the main advantage of using cloud, because your data is never lost really. Since the data is available at multiple locations, whenever a user requests the data from the service, it determines which data centre is nearest to the user and serves the data from that centre. In this scenario, the user can be anywhere in the world. The company may store the user’s data, like login information or some other personal information. However, this data doesn’t belong to any particular country. It is just sitting in the servers until it is requested by the user again. If the government needs any data of the users, and the data is not natively stored in that country, that will be a problem. Because, wherever the data is stored, that countries laws may restrict and sharing user’s data with other countries may not be permitted. As a result, some of the governments have established strict rules to store the data inside the country. But this defeats purpose of cloud.
How is this a problem?
When cloud services are supposed be a giant infrastructure distributing data all over the world according to the users request, they are closing in and breaking themselves into smaller clouds to serve particular geographical area. This is clearly not how cloud was envisioned in its nascent stages. When TV was first broadcasted, we finally thought we are free to watch anything, and later government established some ground rules and priced different channels at different prices. This took away the freedom, which gave way to the dawn of internet, where we can browse anything from anywhere in the world. Internet gave us power in many ways. Now, we wanted a decentralized distribution networks to entertain all the internet users at faster rates. This lead to cloud services, now segmenting the cloud into smaller clouds can only lead to evolution to a new technology or method, but until them we have to live the complications that arising due to present day’s cloud architecture and computing.