Information Evaporation: The Migration Of Information To Cloud Computing Platforms

The physical location for data used in every organization ebbs and flows as technology improves. In the early years of computing, data were stored on the central system because that was the only choice. As communication technology advanced, a decentralized model became popular and data were stored nearer to the place it would be used. Another leap in telecommunications prompted a move back to centralized data storage, mostly because access speeds allowed the data to be used remotely with minimal time lapse due to transmission distance. The most recent transition for housing data is to move data from various databases, some centralized and some localized, into the cloud. The benefits of moving information to a cloud computing environment have made it attractive to organizations recently. Converting data from one platform to another is done regularly by IT professionals. In each of the transitions described above, data had to be converted in some way and transitions to updated computing platforms are not uncommon. In this paper, the term information evaporation will be used to distinguish the move of information to the cloud from other conversion activities, such as system upgrades or platform transitions. Converting data from a traditional database environment to an Internet-based cloud computing environment requires a different approach to security, attention to avoiding creating information silos, and development of data tags, such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML), to facilitate cross platform data access.