Geospatial World Magazine - GeoSpatialWorld.net

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Performance
For normal applications or even mid size applications,
cloud computing can be very efficient but with geospatial
data, which is typically in terabytes, processing can often
prove to be inefficient on the cloud. Virtual machines also
have overheads, compared to applications which run
directly on the hardware utilising low level instructions
set. Large datasets can be processed by distributed data
processing framework such as MapReduce, though it is
not suitable for all kinds of datasets. If the result of the
processing is also in terabytes or gigabytes, a user located
at a long distance from the cloud provider may experience
high latency and delays.
Security & Privacy
Security remains the major concern for cloud user companies.
Users are worried about vulnerability attacks,
when information and valuable data is outside the company
firewall. Even though security challenges are there,
cloud computing is fairly secure, in some cases more
secure than local environment. Chris Matthews and
Yvonne Coady explain that the isolations provided by virtualisation
have security benefits. In case of attack on the
system, virtualisation narrows the attack area to the
explicitly exposed and shared resources. Treating the virtualised
system as a black box, assertions can be made
about the system interaction.
Privacy is an even bigger concern for cloud users as
valuable data is residing at an unknown place. The concern
is that cloud infrastructure is shared between organizations
that are off-premise. However, there are two false
worries about privacy. One, just because data is not in
your premises, it does not automatically become public.
No one can enter a data centre, log into a machine and
look at the data base; in fact, this is more likely to happen
in a small setup rather than in humongous data centres.
Also, just because shared hardware is used it does not
mean that privacy is compromised. Strong isolation of virtual
machines ensures
privacy of the content.
Control
This could be a major concern to geospatial industry as
data is collected and owned by a particular organisation at
a huge cost. When data is put onto the cloud, there is less
organisational control as the cloud infrastructure is not
designed to meet specific organisational needs. To have a
better control, organisation will have to build tools around
its data and provide access via these tools.
Bandwidth cost
By putting data and services onto the cloud, the ownership,
operational and maintenance costs are reduced. But
if dealing with larger data, the network bandwidth costs
can go high.
Reliability
Reliability is a concern, both in terms of data and service
availability. There are outages and service can become
unavailable for few hours. This is illustrated by a recent
case where the outage struck the EC2 service at Amazon's
northern Virginia site affecting a number of websites.
Also, it is hard to rely on the data and information
available on the cloud if its source is not known.
Prognosis for the future
The cloud is the next disruptive technology to impact the
geospatial world. It is resulting in paradigm shifts in the
way we interact with data, software and platforms. As
data becomes more versatile and therefore costly to buy
and archive, data providers will need to relook at their
marketing strategies and models. Similarly, software
developers and value adders will need to look at their
marketing models. Reliability and security will remain
issues and strategies to ensure reliability and security is
to be revisited. At the regulatory level, a total re-look at
policies is needed to take into account the new ways of
acquiring and processing geospatial data and disseminating
the results. Finally, individual as a data sensor and
individual as a consumer of geospatial services will
become more prominent turning geospatial into a consumer
item.
Hiren Bhatt
Systems R&D Engineer
IWS Cloud Platform Group, IPG R&D Lab, Hewlett-Packard. India
hiren.c.bhatt@gmail.com
Prof. Arup Dasgupta
Managing Editor, Geospatial World
Arup.dasgupta@gisdevelopment.net
Geospatial World I May 2011