NASA: Using the private cloud to track the space above the other clouds

What do you do if you're the CIO of a government-funded agency that is 1)  collecting large amounts of critical data, 2) conducting high-performance computing and 3) working with people who are smarter than you - literally, rocket scientists?

That's the challenge in front of James Rinaldi, CIO of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who spoke on a panel at the IDC Cloud Leadership Forum in Silicon Valley today.

Clearly, security is always a concern. For some businesses, the data that needs protecting could be sales figures or customer information or inventory - all sensitive to the company. For Rinaldi's team, the data comes from technology hovering the earth to collect climate change data or spacecraft collecting atmospheric information as it circles Saturn.

And sure, he had a sense of fear about data being housed in the cloud when he was first asked about how his agency could benefit. Security of the cloud can be an intimidating thing, given perceptions of uncertainty around it. But Rinaldi introduced a buzz phrase during the session that resonated with some attendees - "virtual private cloud."

The virtual part of that is interesting because Rinaldi says geography shouldn't come into play when considering where to house a private cloud. In some instances, NASA engineers need to be close - physically close - to their data, but not everything needs to be there. The way Rinaldi sees it, companies should be working on bringing the network to the data instead of trying to bring the data to the network.

Bottom line: as long as there's a firewall protecting the data and "infrastructure" and the access management is solid, it shouldn't matter whether the private cloud is in a cool room in the basement or being housed by Amazon.

There were a few other things that jumped out at me from the session: Rinaldi commented that his engineers are literally rocket scientists, people who are smarter than him (and me) and take it upon themselves to buy/build the tools that they need to do their job on their own. As the watchdog of the data, he worried about engineers taking the data into their own apps, into a world that he has no control over.

Second, he also spoke of the journey into the cloud as being a long-term strategy, not something that changes overnight. It takes years and largely, that's because there can be resistance from within about doing things in a new way.

And it's not just engineers, but also executives, legal, finance and other folks who need an education on the cloud, who need to understand the risks and the benefits -  both in efficiency and real dollars - from the very beginning.

Finally, there's the issue of change. For some, the cloud is just an off-site location where the data is housed and accessed. But the "access" part is important, as well. Many think that you just throw the data on the cloud and keep using the same legacy tools to access and manage it. But that's not always the best route.

In some cases, Rinaldi said, legacy apps may not be worth saving. If you're going with a new way of storing data, it might also be worth creating a new way to accessing it - via apps that your company builds from the ground up to ensure that security features are in place and that the data is beng managed the way it should be.