E D I T O R ’ S
L E T T E R
Are You “All In?”
Whether you like him or not, one thing that can definitely be said about U.S. President Barack Obama is that technology is a key lynchpin in his plan for the future.
And similar to the rest of the IT world these days, at the
centre of Obama’s plan to fix and grow the economy and his business (i.e., U.S. government) is cloud computing. Evidence of this can be seen in the Obama administration, earlier this year, asking U.S. Congress for $35 million US to fund cloud computing programs and other IT initiatives, and another $70 million for the National Institute of Stan- dards and Technology to develop cloud computing standards. One concrete example of the U.S government’s fondness to cloud computing
can be seen in its General Services Administration (GS) launch, last September, of
Apps.gov, a platform on which departments can leverage applications ranging from blogs and search tools to text editing and data management. Furthermore, the GSA is working with the Department of Homeland Security to consolidate 23 data centres into two. According to Vivek Kundra, Obama’s federal chief information officer, “[Tech- nology] is shifting to creating value faster for business. We need to make sure we’re spending taxpayer dollars more intelligently and shifting investment across the federal government.”
Just as the U.S. government is exploring all things cloud, so too are more Canadian businesses, which are looking to increase IT functionality, efficien- cies, service offerings, customer retention and productivity while at the same re- ducing IT infrastructure costs. As you will learn when you read Security Matters’ special roundtable dis-
cussion on page 16, entitled Securing the Cloud, sponsored by Microsoft Canada, there is no turning back on cloud computing. Not only are more and more businesses looking to the cloud to run more applications and store more data, but more and more companies are developing cloud-based programs and services to accommodate this newfound demand. One such company is Mi- crosoft, whose dedication to the cloud cannot be doubted. Here is what Mi- crosoft CEO Steve Ballmer said about the cloud this past March. “For the cloud, we’re all in,” he said during an address and live webcast at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering in Seattle. “Literally, I will tell you we are betting our company on it. The cloud fuels Microsoft and Microsoft fuels the cloud.” The beauty of cloud computing for Canadian businesses is that IT-based companies all over the world — from Microsoft to Google to HP — are devel- oping services for them to make the big leap. As such, businesses will have any type of cloud computing service and/or application at their beckon call. More im- portantly, the developers of these services are focusing on the importance of security and data protection, which for some end users is the ultimate tipping point in their decision.
Publisher/Editor
Paul Grossinger
paul@securitymattersmag.com
Director, New Business Development
Frank Shoniker
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Paul Grossinger
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Contributors
Nicholas Cheung Lynn Greiner Mara Gulens Ian Harvey
Koreen Kimakowich Jack Kohane Brent MacLean Meaghan McCluskey Lance Naismith Andrew Wareing
Security Matters provides Canadian businesses with information that helps them secure their staff, assets, facilities and data. It is published six times a year by KAP Publishing Ltd.
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4 SECURITY MATTERS • MAY/JUNE 2010
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