Re: "Follow the Law" computing

I've been involved in a number of international policy discussions and architecture designs for distributed system that make those policies reasonably enforceable. In some ways you've over-complicated it though I would note that the set of requirements are in many cases internally inconsistent at a basic theoretical level (d'oh!).

The really short version is that there is a lot of interest and agreement among governments in keeping services and even public data physically within their political jurisdiction. This is the lowest common denominator for all intents and purposes. Now, obviously most countries are unlikely to forbid non-governmental services from leaving the country, but it is very much on their mind. This is also being mixed with distributed and decentralized authentication frameworks for some semblance of service verification. The really hard part is designing a metadata protocol that can support everything the want. The major upside to this is that their (possibly correct) paranoia and desire for interoperability is forcing them to think about globally distributed cloud computing that interoperates at a low-level e.g. standards for very tight integration of services behind political firewalls that can be guaranteed at some level to maintain the political integrity of
those services. It sounds like a good basis for secure interoperability generally.

The consequences of this is that a cloud computing provider should probably think about portability and the ability to manage physical location as a first-class capability. This will be particularly true if it is a specialized cloud that takes advantage of service integration in some fashion. There will be some political advantage to being able to throw up a mini-cloud in a particular jurisdiction as needed -- it gives a lot of bureaucrats warm fuzzies even if it doesn't make sense. No need to have law-based routing, they want the services to be in *their* jurisdiction, which is a very simple policy.

The private sector may care much less about this, but if politics dictates some kind of locality of infrastructure for their own needs it may drive similar decisions by default in the private sector simply because they have a physically local cloud infrastructure. So in a way, this addresses the question raised. If governments ultimately dictate (officially or unofficially) political locality for cloud control purposes, I expect we'll eventually end up with clouds physically located in a large number of jurisdictions that private sector users can choose for whatever purposes suit them. Obviously this means that some governments will setup policies that are politically very friendly to cloud computing in an effort to attract business, particularly if interoperability of services becomes easy and tight.

Or at least that is where I see this going.

Andrew

--- On Fri, 6/13/08, ju...t@yahoo.com <ju..@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> - However, both Canada and France have provided examples of
> policies set with the Geopolitical realities of "the
> cloud" in mind. (Canada prohibits public IT projects from
> running in US data centers due to the Patriot Act, and
> France refuses to allow government employees to use
> Blackberries as the communications are processed in the
> UK and US where France fears interception risk is high.)
>
> - So, why not consider moving workload to wherever the
> current task is "most legal" using a combination of
> database sharding, database replication and
> vmotion/livemotion. At the very least, make it damn
> near impossible for a single jurisdiction to nail you with
> a violation.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cloud Computing" group.
To post to this group, send email to cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cloud-computing-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.ca/group/cloud-computing?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---