Keep an eye on your own open source cloud environment

David M Williams
Monday, 10 August 2009 10:46

Business IT - Technology

Want to live in the cloud but don’t quite trust it? SourceForge's open source project of the month for August may be for you! eyeos is a self-hosted cloud operating environment for business, schools and home built in PHP.

The “cloud computing” concept is all about working more and more online and less and less on your local machine.

The advantages of cloud computing are that people who work on multiple devices – home computers, office computers, smartphones, travelling netbooks – can continue to access all their files and mail without needing to think about synchronising data in any way.

Almost twelve months ago Google introduced the Chrome web browser. One of its reasons for being was a view that the world was moving to a greater reliance on web-based services (such as Google’s own application suite.)

At the time I mused this was where Linux-based netbooks particularly had a niche because ultimately, in a cloud environment, the operating system and embedded applications aren’t as important as the ability to simply get online.

Yet even so, despite the amount of effort being invested in cloud-based services such as Google’s offerings or Microsoft’s Azure conventional businesses are still holding back.

There are many reasons for this, not least of which is concerns over security and longevity.

Dr Taher Elgamal – the man behind the SSL protocol – gave an eminently sensible argument that if businesses want to conduct electronic transactions with each other they ultimately must trust each other to have appropriate security. “It is easier to trust in an outsourced cloud server,” Elgamal said.

Yet, on the other hand, earlier this year Hewlett Packard’s online backup service Upline was switched off leaving subscribers to find other options and move data.

You might be interested in investigating the cloud and giving your workers greater mobility but aren’t ready to relinquish control of your data to someone else.

In that case, eyeos is for you.