In an effort to cut down on data centre electricity costs, the US Government are in the process of consolidating their data-centre resources. This will include the possibility of government applications moving to cloud services hosted by Google (AppEngine) or Microsoft (Azure)

We also mention possible side channel attacks on a cloud services, including a paper by Thomas Ristenpart which was published at ACM CCS ‘09 titled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds (PDF).

We also interview Jon Åslund, an Engineer at Spotify. Spotify is a cloud based music service, and Jon spoke about some of the engineering challenges in creating the system.

So, are the benefits of always accessible data and acquiring resources according to demand, justified when considering possible vulnerabilities? Let us know what you think?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.