John Pescatore

I spoke at the Information Policy Security Advisory Board, a federally mandated body that has been around since 1987 when the Dow Jones average passed 2000 in the upward direction, when a 19 year old private pilot evaded Soviet air defenses and landed in Moscow, and the year when the Simpsons first appeared on TV. Man, that was a long time ago – computer security mostly meant avoiding viruses from telephone bulletin board downloads.

The ISPAB membership has broadened over the years – it was good to see people from Google and Fidelity Investments on the board these days. Anyway, the ISPAB was meeting on security issues around cloud-based computing. After Karen Evans of OMB spoke to set the stage, Howard Schmidt introduced our panel and I spoke about tomatoes.

You see, if I want a tomato I can go to Walmart and buy a really cheap tomato that was grown God knows where. If I need a tomato that is a bit tastier, I can go to my local grocery store that has a decent produce shop and the tomatoes are still fairly inexpensive. If I want a really good tasty tomato and am willing to pay a good bit more, I can go to a local farm stand – yum.  I can even go visit the farm to make sure their growing conditions look sanitary or if I only want to buy tomatoes that have been organically farmed and humanely harvested (hey, plants have feelings, too.)

Or if I want the best tomatoes possible, I can grow them myself in my home garden. I can put big fences around my garden, I can choose to use the same growing techniques the factory farms use (if I want cheap tomatoes that taste like rubber) or hydroponic farming or organic farming, or any combination of the above – it is all up to me to customize and it is all up to me to protect my tomatoes from deer and birds and slugs and teenagers.

So, there you have it:

1. If you just need cheap tomatoes, cloud computing is fine and you can just depend on the security of the factory farmers.
2. If you want tasty tomatoes, cloud computing is fine but you will have to specify higher levels of security and you may want to mandate a local cloud be used and you may want to visit to make sure the growing conditions meet your requirements.
3. If you want unique or really, really tasty tomatoes, build your own local cloud to make use of the advantages of cloud-based computing.

It all depends on what kind of tomato the business needs.