Amazon's 7 Cloud Promises: Hype Vs. Reality

3Comments | Doug Henschen | May 01, 2012 09:05 AM

Amazon says cloud computing is an indispensable enabler of seven important computing transformations. We hype-test the promises with a few reality checks.

Reality Check #6: Big Data Security Concerns Remain

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Amazon's 7 Cloud Promises: Hype Vs. Reality

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Reality Check #6: Big Data Security Concerns Remain

Yes, scalable, cloud-based services will particularly appeal to companies that are getting their data from the Internet to begin with, but privacy- and security-sensitive firms won't be rushing into the cloud. Hospitals, banks, intelligence agencies, and other firms have good reason to be paranoid, and perceptions of superior on-premises security still prevail.

Even in the sports business, teams are using big-data sources such as Stats' SportVU system for the NBA and the Pitch FX system used by Major League Baseball since 2006 (and soon to be joined by a Field FX system that collects data on fielding). These camera-based systems track positions of players, the ball, vectors, and velocities on every pitch and play, generating huge amounts of data in the process. That's all publicly available data, yet according to Kevin Goodfellow, an executive at Sportsdatahub.com, teams are usually loath to put their own data on a public cloud. Sportsdatahub does dedicated hosting as well as on-premises deployments of Hadoop-based systems designed to help teams spot promising athletes, team strategies, and marketing approaches.

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