Gregory Maciag

CIO Drivers

“The cloud is poised to overtake mobile as the second largest driver of transformation for CIOs, a study of our readership shows, while data analytics will remain the leader for business transformation agendas for another year.”

Translation: Businesses need information in order to operate and take decisions. We've just about caught up with mobile's place in this. Cloud is the next thing we need to get a handle on.  What drives business? Data.

CIO

Cloud Clarity

For intelligent and lively coverage of the evolving world of cloud computing, I recommend Greg Ness's Archimedius blog. In a recent post he deftly explains what a hybrid cloud is, calling it “a boundless data center”. We need people who can bust through the jargon and get to the business point as neatly as this.

Archimedius

Cloud 2020

Right now we are in the early days of cloud computing, with many organisations taking their first, tentative steps. But by 2020 cloud is going to be a major — and permanent — part of the enterprise computing infrastructure. Here is a great piece on the future of Cloud.  Cloud Watch

Big Data Standards and Provenance

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a fresh and important perspective on standards for big data that business technologists should consider seriously. The key quote from a recent NIST workshop is from Howard Wactlar of the National Science Foundation: “[T]he real breakthroughs will come when we are able to use someone else’s data.”

How many businesses are investing in their own proprietary data models intended to facilitate data integration across their own sources... without considering the need to integrate other sources? It's a natural viewpoint to take – but a limiting one. It ignores the fact that the development of technical standards for big data and cloud services are driving the wider shareability of data.

 The scientists at the workshop recognized three challenges to standards for big data in their area of interest. These are provenance, cross-domain standards, and security. I guess cross-domain standards naturally come top of my own list, because creating definitions that enable people to share data across boundaries is what industry standards are all about – from the department level right up to international trading. But the scientists put “provenance” first: for them, knowing where a piece of data came from is on a par with knowing what it represents.

As business organizations come to share, trade and aggregate data on a wider scale, the question of provenance will assume a greater priority for us too. Would you buy a ten-year price data series without some assurance that it comes from a reputable source?

Now, scientists guard reputation through institutions – principally universities, research institutions and learned journals. These bodies act as the guarantors of data quality. Business does not have the same reputation infrastructure. Data providers with trusted brands may well act as sourcers and packagers of raw big data, underwriting its quality before selling it on to users. If so, they too will need their quality standards – ideally, open, transparent ones. Arguably, within specific industries, trade associations might be better placed to fulfil this function on behalf of the communities they serve.

Standards for Big Data

Cloud Futures

The IEEE is leading efforts to create interoperability standards for cloud computing. CIO Alexander Pasik has also been thinking about how businesses should deal with their concerns about cloud security, and sharing his thoughts with InformationWeek. He says that one of the reasons why customers are happy to let banks handle their money, rather than keeping it under the mattress, is that bank deposits are insured. Pasik suggests that cloud providers should offer similar security against a data breach.

 As I've noted elsewhere, the cyberinsurance market is heating up. I agree with Pasik's analysis, and I particularly like this statement: "Security can't be guaranteed, but it can be insured."

But I have issue with a statement made elsewhere in the article - and not, I hasten to say, attributed to Pasik. This is the idea that "the damage done by a security breach usually can be quantified financially so enterprises that suffer one could still be compensated". The word I'm picky about is "usually".

I've been reading Douglas W. Hubbard's book How To Measure Anything, and it's made me hypersensitive to claims that there are unmeasurables in business. Hubbard would change that "usually" to "always". If the damage can't be quantified financially, then it isn't damage. And, as Hubbard mentions in the book, insurance is all about quantifying intangibles - putting a value on abstract things, and putting a price on potential events.

On a different tack, perhaps cloud providers should look at the other reasons why customers trust banks. Isn't a big reason that the banks provide services among themselves that customers could not afford to perform for themselves? Life would grind to a halt without the national and global payment systems. And then there's the payment of interest.

What could cloud providers do to emulate these banking benefits? They could imitate banking payment systems by offering to ship data securely between parties on scheduled dates. They could add more value by brokering collaborative processes between their users, so that, for example, an electronics retailer and an insurer could work together to sell breakdown cover without the need for any systems integration by either party.

Cloud providers could even replicate the concept of interest by "paying" their customers with anonymized, aggregated usage data culled from across the cloud's total activities. All of these measures would require a substantial change in service relationships - but all industries have to evolve if they're to survive and thrive.

 Cloud Insurance

Push for Cloud Standards

Ara Trembly reports on the CSCC and efforts to address some of the challenges of cloud computing.  A topic that I often address on the blog. Many of the issues address interoperability and security challenges among cloud platforms.  There are many types of standards involved in networking today.  And we also provide Web Services Profile, SOAP, Security Profiles to support our standards.  But as far as DATA STANDARDS, we have them in place and they appear to be the common denominator among platform providers and their customers,

As usual Trembly does a good job of digging for details, he reports that "Amid all the talk we hear about established and developing data standards in the insurance industry, a new player has emerged to push for such standards related to adoption and use of cloud technology. 

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC), according to the group’s web site, is “an end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud’s successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud. The Council is not a standards organization, but will complement existing cloud standards efforts and establish a core set of client-driven requirements to ensure cloud users will have the same freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness they have with traditional IT environments.”  

Read More at Insurance Networking News

Cloud 2 Cloud?

We know the value of data standards in our business.  In a prior post, I emphasized the need for cloud providers to embrace ACORD standards.  But there is also a need for standards that enable cloud interoperability.  We do not have a single insurance industry cloud.  I won't go into history but it could have be done in the past and it may be done in the future.  Regardless, the idea of interoperability is getting serious attention from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Vint Cerf, the father of the internet via his role in developing the TCP/IP protocol, is warning that cloud computing is leading to new islands of data. “Each cloud thinks it is the only cloud in the world,” says Cerf.

If you've lodged a mass of data in the cloud belonging to provider A, and want to move it to provider B, you're trapped. There are no agreed data standards for porting, nor for the metadata used for access control. It's not that there aren't potentially usable standards out there, just that the industry isn't rushing to implement any.

These days Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Google runs cloud services, as do Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and a growing number of providers. I believe Cerf is taking the right line in encouraging the industry to enable more portability.

At ACORD we've found that the adoption of standards grows business opportunities for everybody. It's tempting to build a wall around a proprietary area and hold your customers hostage, but ultimately it's a self-defeating strategy. That's a practice that only makes customers determined to escape and spurs them to find workarounds.

I'd guess that unless cloud providers give in to the inevitable need for standards, we'll see neutral, translator clouds emerging. These neutrals will undertake to suck any data you like from any cloud and spit it into another. One of these neutrals will do the job so well that customers will decide not to complete the process, and leave their data with the intermediary. This is how great new businesses are born. I'd be surprised if Google didn't already have well-advanced plans to offer this kind of service. Remember: you read it here first.

Standards for Clouds

Download Standards Get Cloud Out of the 1970s