Cloud Services With Strings Attached...

Without trust, banks can't exist. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first fireside chat with the citizens of the United States, March 12, 1933. That radio broadcast came only eight days into his first term.  After Roosevelt had to close down all banks because of a run on assets.

Since then a varitey of regulations and faith building steps were put into place, until of course the financial banking calamity of recent years put into question "who is running this ship". And another loss of confidence. Trust is what makes an economy flourish or flounder. Trust in companies, the relationships we build and the assurances we get that the products we buy are fresh, well built and without hazard.

Trust is given and taken each time we open our mailboxes..the physical ones.
 
(Believe it or not) 87% of 9000 Americans surveyed by the Ponemon Institute in its 2010 Privacy Trust Study of the US Government ranked the Postal Service first amongst 75 federal government agencies. Simply put we trust that the US Postal  Service is able to keep our information safe and secure. It has a 230 year
history. When you go into a USPS office, you expect reliable and safe delivery of your packages. 

OK, if you are extra cautious about those tax forms and sensitive merger documents you call in FedEx or any number of courier services. Its more expensive but it lowers risk and increases peace of mind with guaranteed delivery and signatures. 

Oh but I am blogging about online a.k.a cloud services.

A cloud provider (LLC, corporation etc.) that cannot be trusted will not exist. Sounds simple enough. I will add some other predictions for a patently untrustworthy cloud service providers:

(1) put out of business because of the natural order of things
(2) be relegated into a bazaar of low-cost and low-quality offerings
(3) be shutdown by the government after a major data breach
(4) if large enough and a "critical infrastructure" be nationalized in the event of a national security issue
(5) address a commodity market that deals with pretty much worthless customer data

Its hard to see that an enterprise (hospital, bank, law firm, pharma etc.) that is going paper-less, will disregard the weight and meaning of trust as it goes about doing its business. In particular when talking about proprietary information. And while the security of sensitive data in the cloud is being hashed out, there is not enough focus on the larger context and meaning of trust: how its created, how it's maintained and how it's destroyed. The conversation dive's into passwords, encryption, regulatory compliance and he said, she said.

OK sure, as consumers we store sensitive information (banking information, personal letters, legal documents) on any number of popular online mail and storage accounts. Truth of the matter, most of these online service providers have been in business less than 10 years. There is social shift in the expectation of low (or no) privacy in cyberspace (another topic).

With that said, the more we have to lose, the less likely we'll trust just "anybody".  And by trust, I mean our willingness to depend (or interdependence) on someone (or something) else. In my simple mind, there are four behaviors that we exhibit in the real-world which are naturally present in cyberspace:

1. Carelessness          
2. Paranoia          
3. Practicality: Most businesses and consumers would like to be in this mindset as we are bombarded with new technology and the peer pressure to move into the state of the art. We rank convenience high. We may take care of basic check boxes, but we are not finicky
4. Prudence
   
As enterprises(and consumers) ramp up the volume of outsourcing of data storage, shared application hosting and third-party data processing, we'll see more of the prudent mind-set start to change the marketplace for cloud services.

Vendors will have to respond to a demand for "assured" cloud services that offer more than one-sided technical security controls, standards and empty promises.

The service provider in this sector will demonstrate financial viability. They have a history and reputation. They see your data as a currency with a Dollar, Yen, Euro etc. value to it. There will be unambiguous obligations to provide compensation from disruption, damage or loss of data. Its nothing new in terms of old-school expectations from any service provider.

Its an understanding that there are some relationships that simply must be built on confidence, some mistakes were built to last - and you can in fact measure trust in cyberspace.

President Roosevelt told his countrymen, "there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more  important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people"...replace financial system with critical cloud services.