<OT> clouds

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 05:32, Ric Moore wrote:
> I know this is slightly OT, but what is the experience using the Ubuntu
> flavor of "the cloud" or just the "cloud" in general? I'm skeptical as
> all heck. One of of Non-Profit team members wants to put our financial
> data "out there" in google. Me, I'm going oh hell no! Are any of them
> particularly safe? Is running your own Ubuntu "cloud" better than the
> other offerings? More secure? The ultimate goal is to have being able to
> collaborate on the books, live, at different locations connected to the
> net. Me, I lean towards running our own server with a static IP address,
> as being as secure as we can make it. Which might be better than the
> commercial offerings. Plus, I'm making the case for Open Source, rather
> than MS.
>
> I just want to pick some brains here, to guide my own thinking.

This may be contrary to intuition, but cloud solutions are usually more
secure than local solutions, because usually they have fine grained
security built in. Plus any decent cloud solution gives you real time
reporting and auditing, so you can see who accessed certain data and when.
Try that with local software, it's extremely hard.

That being said, I don't think that just dumping a spreadsheet with your
financial data into Google Docs is a good idea. The problem isn't
technology, but users who may be a little careless. However if you were
thinking about real financial software in the cloud (SaaS), then you
should be OK. Yes I'm talking about commercial solutions, but these may
still be based on Open Source. It's just a different licensing model: you
don't pay for the purchase of several thousand lines of compiled code, but
for a service that enables you to do your job, and the actual bits that
provide the service may be Open or Closed Source.