I’ve been thinking a bit about my final year project recently (which involved Globus Grid technology) and also about Apache Hadoop/MapReduce style processing. The latter seems to be in the category of ‘cloud’ computing, and while suitable for company internal deployments, in comparison to Globus, really doesn’t have any of the security bits you’d want if you were building a resource to share. That strikes me as a little odd because ‘the cloud’ is something that we tend to think of as being a ‘web scale’ thing, not something stuck behind a firewall.
(How) Should we share a cloud? What security is practical (i.e. do we lose capability by adding lots of security)? Should we simply have many single user clouds? Backed by a single secure store?
It’s also particularly interesting to think this week about simple, secure data processing on large data sets, and how much trouble HMG could have avoided if they’d had the capability to easily filter out sensitive information from their dataset…
