IT Security and the Cloud: What Google’s Approach Tells Us

The Wall Street Journal today ran an interesting article about Google’s IT structure. The interesting part to me is when Douglass Merrill, Google’s CIO, discusses how the company’s security structure works. Instead of focusing on the endpoints such as a computer or a smartphone, the concentration is on making the infrastructure itself more secure. This is especially noteworthy when you think about the migration of common computing applications to the cloud, which in essence deemphasizes the need for security at the level of the computer and shifts that need to the internet based application. This shift of making information accessible in a centrally located place is nothing new, and might even be surprising when you take the blogging example into account. Blogging was supposed to move the locale of information away from the centralized new sources to decentralized, loosely connected individuals. But maybe what it really does is shift the information away from news sources that existed as the spokes and moved it toward the hub, in this case being the cloud. In the end though, the hub-and-spoke model is probably not the best example, but rather a more diversified network where connections exist across various levels but all tend toward a centralized nucleus.