By ,
July 24, 2011 - 2:16 PM
The technology world is certainly cloudy. A part of that is a severe confusion of the terms used to describe “The Cloud.” So before I say what I want to say, let me add some clarity. There are three primary uses of the Cloud, and no it’s not to edit photos like Microsoft’s commercials would have you believe. First are Cloud file systems, second Cloud based applications (a.k.a software as a service SaaS), and third virtualization.
Cloud file systems, in the ECM world, are the most popular topic. So when an ECMer uses the term, “The Cloud”, they are probably talking about solutions like Box.net or Dopbox which are Cloud file systems.
To the consumer, “The Cloud” is predominantly Apps, where all settings, and processing are happing somewhere else besides their own desktop/laptop.
However, if you talk about “The Cloud” with system administrators or IT managers, they most likely are thinking about virtualization. Taking whole environments and putting them in “The Cloud” along with all the cool administration tools that come with it.
I’ve seen all of these worlds now, and found it’s important to understand which you are talking about. I have spoken about the use of records management in “The Cloud”, and at that time I was referring to securing documents in a Cloud file system. However, today, I want to talk about a slightly different perspective, and that is records management in the last category, the virtualization world.
At the core of “The Cloud” is virtualization. This is the technology that makes the Cloud scalable, and less expensive than in the good old days, of dealing with mounds of physical hardware. At the heart of virtualization is an entity called the Virtual Machine or VM. A VM is the solitary representation of an environment’s, operating system (OS), software, and all configurations. It’s like taking your whole desktop and putting it into a single file. Just like any other file, as long as the right “viewer”, in this case a hyper visor, is available, it can be opened and run. The problem is these files are very large, on average even a compressed VM is 20GB.
Other than its size, a VM is no different than any other file. Often shared as formats .vmdk or .ova, they have content ( OS, software, configurations ), meta-data, description, version, last modified date etc.. Here is where it gets fun.
In the not too distant future, are we going to have to worry about records management for VMs!? I suspect yes. At CloudShare, we already do, we actually have set retention periods for VMs that have been removed from an old environment or snapshot. But at CloudShare we are thinking of retention more from an overall performance perspective, not a legal one. What happens when legal gets involved? What happens when whole environments are considered records in a case? Could a judge ask for whole VMs to be turned over just like files?
It’s actually already happening. In the JVM world you have Oracle going after Google for their configuration of a Java based VM at the core of Android devices. And in the world of software piracy, where the law is broken within a VM, handing them over to authorities is no big surprise.
I suspect that when the technical world is predominantly in “The Cloud”, thus in some VM somewhere, control over the VM files is going to be essential. There will need to be a process to version whole VMs and VM snapshots, a process of record declaration, a process of destruction and retention, and even eDiscovery.
The war to control the virtualization is very heavy right now. I call it the battle of hyper visors, the biggest contenders in the Windows space are VMWare and of course Microsoft. The good news is that anymore it’s possible to convert a VMware VMDK file to a Microsoft Hyper-V environment. Will it eventually just be a standard like PDF? Probably.
The only hurdle preventing VMs from being passed around like word documents is their size, and the world’s exposure to them. Both are solved with time. High performance networks transferring data at gigabytes per second versus megabytes already exist, and will soon hit the masses. So do compression and acceleration technology making files smaller and more portable. These will make passing VMs effortless. Additionally more and more people in the legal, records management, and judicial space will understand what a VM is, and demand some control around them. So records managers beware, soon you will be adding VMDK files to your retention schedule.
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