Business School swaps Google Apps for Microsoft Live@edu

Computer World reports today that a French Business School is swapping Google Apps for Microsoft Live@edu - this is another step in the direction of Cloud Computing in education. Live@edu offers hosted e-mail service, which includes calendar and contact management, instant messaging, video conferencing and 10GB of storage space. Staff and students will also use Microsoft Office 2010 and have access to Sharepoint Online. Interestingly, the applications will run in Microsoft's European data centers - and not in the School itself.

I think that this is something that we in Education are going to see more of.

I have not followed the debate about Cloud Computing very closely. However, I do know that many organizations have reservations about security of data in the Cloud. The Gartner Group recently reported that there are seven security risks associated with Cloud Computing:

1. Privileged user access
2. Regulatory compliance
3. Data location
4. Data segregation
5. Recovery
6. Investigative support
7. Long-term viability

Consider item #3 - when you use the Cloud, you probably won't know exactly where your data is hosted. In fact, you might not even know what country it will be stored in. Gartner recommends that you should raise these issues with vendors before selecting a cloud vendor.