Who's a Bigger Danger to Cloud Innovation: Hackers or the Government?

The recent phishing attack from China on Gmail targeted influential journalists, senior military personel and government officials in the White House. Along with the hack on Sony's Playstation network--a 44-day affair that cost the company an estimated $171 million--the recent rash of internet security breaches has many wondering whether America is prepared to take the big leap into cloud computing. 


One of the major impediments to quicker adoption of cloud services is the lack of an open standard for companies building in that space. Dell, IBM, Cisco, Hewlett Packard and others are working together to simplify the infrastructure so that applications can work seamlessly across platforms, but the more open they make the standards, the more susceptible the cloud becomes to hackers. 


Assuming Apple can fend of the hackers and thieves, one other body may stand in the way of a quick and lucrative shift to cloud computing: the government. A recent flurry of activity on Capitol Hill to reevaluate the government's role in protecting citizens' digital rights and regulating e-commerce show that lawmakers are making the Internet a priority. Senator Al Franken grilled representatives from Apple and Google over mobile privacy practices, and Senator Jay Rockefeller took Facebook to task over letting younger users sign-up for its services.


The inverse relationship between digital security and digital innovation is something that neither the government nor the technology companies seem to be handling incredibly well. Google's Eric Schmidtwagged a finger at the government this week for tinkering with the basic fabric of the Internet, but only a few days later his company failed to keep hackers out of Google users' inboxes.

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