interesting case regarding ‘Stored Communications Act’
The Supreme Court of South Carolina recently ruled that webmail cannot be classified as online storage and are therefore not covered by the Stored Communications Act of 1986. The case involved a woman who hacked into her husband’s online email accounts to see if he was being unfaithful. This may have some interesting repercussions regarding the cloud […]
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Peggy Lawson 7:21 pm on October 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Group 6 did a great job for me of distinguishing between the 3 major categories of Cloud Computing – SaaS. IaaS, and PaaS (http://cloudlearning.weebly.com/what-is-cloud-learning.html). In my own school division, I’ve seen increasing use of Saas, but I know that many school divisions have really moved towards that direction, using Google Apps, Microsoft services, or other cloud tools as critical players – for example for providing all students and sometimes staff with email and other essential services. I can see this becoming more prevalent. While I’ve personally heard of few divisions using the cloud for infrastructure or platform, and my own job is on the instructional, not infrastructure side of technology, I can certainly see huge economical benefits for doing so, under the right conditions. One obstacle, I think, will be that getting over that reluctance of giving up local control (not withstanding the security and other cautions listed by Team 6).
Peggy
C. Ranson 6:19 am on October 14, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
After reading this weeks posted information and articles it appears that “the future
is cloudy”.
This weeks group provided an excellent summary of cloud technology and identified the fundamental components to a better understand how it is integrated into the complex world of technology and the current issues related to this new market. There appears to be both advantages and disadvantages of cloud-computing. The benefits are cost and efficiency, being closely intertwined. For an organization the capital costs can be reduced with the implementation of cloud technology through buying virtual server time and storage space, IT departments transition into an operational role and the physical space and expense of housing servers no longer exists. For students cloud-computing increases accessibility, adds mobility, improves availability and integrity of software applications, research materials and storage capacity. For faculty it provides accessibility to virtual space for delivery of educational curriculum, customization of individual courses and provides department and campus unity. For administration it will provide standardization of resources and data management, reduced costs, reduce the need for IT staff, and supports greater virtualization. Of course, there are liabilities with the cloud market and its development being in the early stages. Lack of definitive standards, the concern of lock-in of data, confidentiality of data, where cloud servers reside and regulations, licensing and cost models. The implementation of could-computing in the near future will be linked to organizational decision-makers and the organization’s level of technology awareness.
Catherine