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Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing

The Aspen Institute published a 90 page round table report in April entitled "Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The next-generation Internet's impact on business, governance and social interaction" under a generous Creative Commons License. I read the freely available pdf over the last week with interest, as it covers a lot of the topics I am talking on this blog, and gives a good introduction into cloud computing (of which I have not yet written).

The paper is a report by J.D. Lasica of a round table discussion with a number of very experienced people that occurred just before the 2008 presidential election. It included people such as Rod Beckstrom, Director of the National Cyber Security Center of the United States Department of Homeland Security, David Kirkpatrick Senior Editor of Internet and Technology at Forune Magazine, Professor Paul M Romer of Stanford University, known for his work on New Growth Theory, Hal Varian, chief ecoomist at Google, and many more...

The discussion around the table must have been very stimulating. Here is my take on the paper.

Identity

Identity turned out to be the core of the discussion. The abstract summarized this best:

Throughout the sessions personal identity arose as a significant issue. Get it right and many services are enabled and enhanced. The group tended to agree that a user-centric open identity network system is the right approach at this point. It could give everyone the opportunity to manage their own identity, customize it for particular purposes, (i.e., give only so much information to an outsider as is necessary for them to transact with you in the way you need), and make it scalable across the Net. Other ways of looking at it include scaling the social web by allowing the individual to have identity as a kind of service rather than, as Lasica writes, "something done to you by outside interests."

The Cloud

The cloud is a way to abstract everything in the connected web space. It is the way the user thinks of the net. It is nebulous. Where information and services are is not important. This is the experience people have when they read their mail on gmail. They can read their mail from their computer, or from their cell phone, or from their hotel, or from their friends computer. The mail and the web, and their flickr photos, and their delicious bookmarks are all there.

The cloud from the developer's point of view is very similar. He buys computing power or storage on Amazon, Google, GoGrid or the upcoming Sun Cloud. Where exactly the computer is located is not important. If demand for the service he develops grows, he can increase the number of machines to serve that demand. This of course is a great way to quickly and lightly get startups going - no need to get huge financing for a very large number of servers to deal with a hypothetical peak load.

The Social Networks on the cloud also allow people to link up and form virtual and short lived organizations for a task at hand. This again reduces costs enabling the companies to get started for very little money, very quickly, try out an idea. The paper does not say this: venture capital is no longer needed -- good thing too, as it has been serverely reduced by the current recession.

The Cloud and Identity

The cloud is the abstraction where the physical location of things becomes unimportant. What operating systems run the software we use, what computers they run on, where these computers are, all that is abstracted away, virtualized into a puff of smoke.

What is of course still needed is a way to name things and locate them in the cloud. What is needed is a global namespace, and global identifiers. These are indeed known as a Universal Resource Locator (URL). Since everything else is abstracted away, URLs are the only consistent abstraction left to identify resources.

It is therefore just one small step for the panelists to agree that something like foaf+ssl is the solution to identity on the cloud. It is user centric, distributed, permits global social networks, and allows for people to have multiple personalities... Foaf+ssl provides exactly what the panelists are looking for:

open identity would provide the foundation for people to invent and discover a new generation of social signals, advice services, affinity groups, organizations and eventually institutions. Because the identity layer is grounded on the principles of openness and equality, anyone would be able to create social networks, tagging systems, repu- tation systems or identity authentication systems.

Posted at 08:30PM May 21, 2009 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb  |  Comments[1]