02 Mar 2011
The UK government's G-Cloud initiative will never reach its full potential because it is hamstrung by data privacy laws, according to officials from Lockheed Martin, the US arms and aerospace manufacturer commissioned to administer the UK 2011 census.
"We need to be clear that legislation is an impediment," Melvin Greer, chief strategist for Lockheed Martin, the largest provider of cloud services to the US government, told the audience at IBM Pulse.
In the UK and Europe, data privacy laws prevent the movement of data outside the jurisdiction, which is the antithesis of the multi-tenancy concept of cloud computing, said Greer.
Privacy and confidentiality will continue to be a problem for the UK's G-Cloud unless legislation catches up with the cloud, according to Greer.
"What is lagging behind of course is the legislation. Security is a technical thing, but privacy and confidentiality are legal things," he said.
The legislation must change, said Greer.
"Governments should all be updating their laws if they aren't already. What they will do, including the UK, is update the laws so that the necessary framework to protect their citizens from being exposed to cloud computing, by having their data being put in the cloud, is in place," he added.
Protesters in the UK have urged citizens to boycott the census because of Lockheed Martin's involvement in the arms trade.
Lockheed Martin's advertising slogan is: "We never forget who we are working for".
All governments face similar problems and consequently will adopt hybrid models, Greer predicted.
"Part of the reason is that traditional IT solutions that we deliver today are not going to go away. This is especially true for governments where hybrid models will always be core," said Greer.
"You will certainly see companies in a commercial environment moving entirely to the cloud, but in government you will always see a variety of different deployment models being used."
Greer blames this on legacy systems as well as security.
"Governments have an embedded IT infrastructure, and they have been spending lots of money on their IT delivery systems," he said.
"It is not reasonable to assume governments will abandon these in a wholesale fashion. It is far more reasonable to see hybrid cloud models being used.
"Security is the number one impediment for governments though.
"This of course is more of a conversation around privacy and confidentiality. The UK government and the G-Cloud initiative will have to deal with the concept of having a secure infrastructure because of this," he added.
Contrary to what Mr Greer is reported as saying, it is not the case that EU data protection laws prevent use of cloud services. Many European entities use cloud services without problem. Yes, data protection law raises some issues which need to be addressed, but they are readily surmountable. I have covered this (and other legal issues) in my recent book on the law of the cloud: www.tinyurl.com/cloudlaw.
Posted by: Renzo Marchini 04 Mar 2011
Top Pentagon Military Officers are also Top Lockheed Martin Salesmen
Not sated after sacking the U.S. Treasury, like locusts our Military Industrial Complex is swarming around the globe seeking new sources of sustinance. In the photo linked below we see U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz presenting a model of the C-130J-30 Super Hercules to Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony at a ceremony at the Air Force Station at Hindon near New Delhi, India on Saturday (5 February 2011) to mark the induction of the first of six Lockheed Martin C-130J airplanes purchased for the Indian Air Force.
U.S. total debt $55.6 trillion, U.S. federal debt $14.1 trillion, U.S. federal deficit $1.5 trillion, U.S. dollar rapidly losing world reserve currency status, as U.S. politicians bought and paid for by multinational corporations (legalized by Citizens United vs. FEC) cut education, close schools, convert asphalt roads to gravel and accelerate America's descent into oblivion so they can pay Lockheed Martin and other greed- and graft-infested government contractors billions for Rube Goldberg defense systems and myriad non-defense boondoggles as unnecessary, unaffordable and unjustifiable as our unending wars for oil and profit. And with the open support of Pentagon top brass, the debt for death and destruction will grow to plague nations around the world:
http://watchingfrogsboil.com/top-pentagon-military-officers-are-also-top-l
Posted by: watchingfrogsboil 02 Mar 2011
We have been here before, with the 'Information sharing: vision statement' from Tony Blair's Department of Constitutional Affairs. That identified four legal barriers to sharing information ad lib between public bodies - human rights, data protection law, common law confidentiality, and ultra vires. Privacy may not be protected per se in UK law (though it should be). But even without that the fundamental requirements of rule of law are too much trouble for whitehall to observe, it seems.
Posted by: Guy Herbert, General Secretary NO2ID 02 Mar 2011
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