Who Owns My Cloud?

A lot is being made of Amazon’s move on Friday to delete from customers Kindle devices certain titles. An article on Yahoo Tech! declares “It’s easy to see their (customer’s) side of the argument. Once paid for, no book should ever be deleted. Period”. So, basically, if you purchase a book even on Kindle, the ownership should be just like a physical book purchase – so goes the argument. The problem however is Kindle is a service and just like any service has certain terms of service. It seems like, Amazon’s right to delete content is outlined in the Kindle terms of service! You can argue it is unethical but certainly not illegal. The devil, as always, lies in the details.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with  CIO (back in 2003) about certain cloud application the CIO was looking at. This CIO was very interested in moving the company into cloud applications and willing to take typical risks associated with an early mover. In the end, the CIO stayed away from the cloud application for one main reason – the lack of ownership of content created in the cloud.

This was back in 2003 and one could argue – there are better service terms in place today. However, as the Amazon story reminds us, the cloud is still an evolving landscape that is not yet standardized. In all the buzz about cloud computing, it is very easy to get carried away and lose sight of the fact that when all said and done, cloud computing is a service based on certain ‘terms of service’. After all these years, it is still important for a CIO to be able to answer the question – Who Owns My Cloud?