BEFORE THEY’RE GONE

source, a modern company’s job is much
simpler.
“With electricity, you just plug an appliance
in, and it works,” Reavis says. “Cloud
computing is the same way. If you have a service
you want to provide to the entire world,
you can go rent what you need on the cloud
and plug into it.”
What is the Cloud Security Alliance’s part
in all this?
In building the alliance, Reavis emulated
the model of Facebook, allowing users to join
and collaborate on topics that interest them.
Together, they discuss and find solutions for
securing the cloud.
“In some cases, it means we create research
documents that a Google or a Microsoft can
use or that a large Fortune 500 bank can use
for best practices,” he says. “In other cases
we’re advising governments on what they
should do.”
And it’s working.
“With no hesitation at all are we seeing
the large tech companies, as well as the large
Fortune 500 companies from every industry,
come to us,” Reavis says. “What they understand
is that for this to work, we have to have
an agreed-upon set of standards. This has to
work on a global scale. The economics of cloud
computing don’t work if you’re only offering
this to one country or one industry. You have
to provide these services pretty ubiquitously to
build that economy of scale.”
What does the future look like?
“We’re on the brink of a lot of change,”
Reavis says. “Soon we’ll see mass adoption of
certain types of cloud computing configurations,
operating systems and standards that
will likely be used for generations, so it’s
important that we act right now not only
to secure those decisions but to create some
choice so that people don’t get locked in.”
Matthew Anderson (’06, Journalism) is
Western’s New Media Coordinator.
Remember
THE VAX?
Jim Reavis graduated from Ferndale High School in
1983 and, like so many of us, moved on to college without
a clue about the kind of career he wanted.
Tinkering in Western’s Computer Science labs
changed that.
“When I compare my experiences in retrospect at
Western with people who went to other colleges at the
same time, it’s really amazing how advanced Western
was,” he says. “I took some introductory computer classes,
and Western had this thing called the VAX computer
system. This was 1983, but we had email, chat, real-time
access. It wasn’t very long, maybe my second computer
science class, that I figured out this was absolutely what I
wanted to do.”
He landed a banking job working with computers,
but that didn’t fit.
“I liked computers more than I liked banking,” he
says.
His next job involved building the early parts of the
Internet – long before it was called that – connecting
computers to each other, one business to the next.
“As we started creating these different connections
between companies, that’s when security got really interesting.
How do you take advantage of this opportunity
to connect with consumers but keep out competitors
and bad people?”
Soon, Reavis was hooked on computer security. After
creating and then selling his own dot-com – focused on
information security, of course – Reavis began looking
for other ways to put his skills to use. Once he determined
that cloud computing presented the next big
problem, his path was clear.
www.wwu.edu/window
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