ManyMedia

DRCN, Design of Reliable Communication Networks, will be held in Washington DC on Oct. 26-29, 2009. This is the group’s seventh conference, first time in the United States.

About the conference:

DRCN 2009 is a well established forum for scientists, engineers, designers and planners from industry and academia who have interests in reliability and availability of communication networks, end systems and related topics. From equipment and technology for survivability to network management and public policy, through theory and techniques for survivable and robust network and application design, the aim of the conference is to bring together people from those disciplines in a lively forum. We hope you will join us in Washington, D.C., USA during October of 2009.

At this point they’re calling for papers (limited 8 pages, to be published in IEEE Conference Proceedings) by April 1, and proposals for tutorials by May 15.

Events, Network, Policy conference, Internet, reliability, SOHO nets, telecom

One of the latest buzzwords in technology is cloud computing. In this scenario, the Internet is considered to be “the cloud.” The basic idea, roughly stated, is that we no longer need to rely on our local computer hard drives for everything–including software applications and storage. Now we can just log into various Internet-based services, use their applications, and store our documents on their servers.

Many examples of cloud computing are common and in use every day. On a personal level, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn help you manage your contacts and address book (friends, colleagues), and Flickr helps manage and display your photo collection. On a business level, Google Docs and Zoho offer a suite of tools for writing, accounting, and much, much more.

We all know that technology is not perfect. Combined with human interaction, we get a system that can be surprisingly fragile. Cloud computing is one example of this.

I have had the frustrating experience (many times) of using–and coming to depend on–GoogleDocs for group writing projects. I always found it frustrating when, without prior notice, Google would implement changes in the user interface that complicated our group work; or when Google Docs had a service hiccup and our group’s documents became unavailable for some time.

Similarly, others are documenting problems. I wrote about Digital Eviction (on Digital ID Coach) a couple of weeks ago citing Phil Wolff’s Data Portability article that’s timely and relevant to this post about having growing pains in cloud computing. Phil’s post offers six actions that might be appropriate to address the problems that cloud computing are likely to create. Briefly, those include:

• Intervention with a back-up service
• Prevent and educate on graceful exit strategy
• Commit to adding appropriate language to contracts (EULAs and TOSs)
• Insure your digital assets
• Advocate for the little guy
• Enforce with real laws and penalties

As we are increasingly dependent on cloud-based service providers, recognizing the vulnerability of these services makes it more important than ever to create back-ups of our work. One place might be on our local hard drives. I urge you to do it now.

Content, Network, Policy, Scenarios backup, cloud computing, digital assets, SAAS, service providers, terms of service