Mark Lyn­der­say

Vil­ma Vil­lalo­bos, Mi­crosoft's cor­po­rate af­fairs man­ag­er for Latin Amer­i­can new mar­kets, vis­it­ed T&T last week to share up­dates on the com­pa­ny's work on cloud-based so­lu­tions. Vil­lalo­bos was quick to note that Mi­crosoft is no new en­trant to the cloud com­put­ing mar­ket, hav­ing bought and run the Hot­mail ser­vice be­fore soft­ware ser­vices on re­mote servers be­came known as cloud ser­vices.

In the last 12 months, Mi­crosoft an­nounced 22 new clients mak­ing use of its busi­ness-fo­cused cloud ser­vice, Azure, two ma­jor com­pa­nies, Caribbean Air­lines and the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny, and a Live@edu in­stal­la­tion at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness.

The growth in cloud com­put­ing has been rapid and, for many on­line users, all con­sum­ing. From Mi­crosoft's per­spec­tive, crit­i­cal is­sues are emerg­ing from that trend, and one of them is the per­va­sive­ness of "big da­ta," mas­sive datasets of in­for­ma­tion gath­ered by on­line ser­vices.

Mi­crosoft es­ti­mates that such da­ta grows by a fac­tor of 10 every five years and busi­ness and gov­ern­ments will be chal­lenged to make ef­fec­tive use of such large pools of raw in­for­ma­tion. Gov­ern­ments and large com­pa­nies will al­so find that in ad­di­tion to chal­lenges in man­ag­ing and min­ing such da­ta, there are is­sues of pri­va­cy that emerge as a re­sult of the cor­re­la­tions that hap­pen with such vast amounts of da­ta and the open­ness that the in­creas­ing­ly so­cial na­ture of the Web has en­abled.

Those con­cerns are am­pli­fied with the growth of BY­OD (bring your own de­vice) in the cor­po­rate space as em­ploy­ees in­creas­ing­ly ex­press a pref­er­ence for hard­ware of their own choos­ing as clients for com­pa­ny net­works.

This clash be­tween con­sumer de­vices and the rapid growth of shar­ing with tra­di­tion­al mod­els of cor­po­rate se­cre­cy and dis­cre­tion are mat­ters that have been oc­cu­py­ing Mi­crosoft's at­ten­tion, and the com­pa­ny plans to am­pli­fy its ef­forts to share what it's been learn­ing with lo­cal au­di­ences through pro­fes­sion­al en­gage­ments soon.

"Peo­ple are ask­ing, where is my da­ta and how is it be­ing used?" said Vil­lalo­bos. "We can be in­volved in the re­view and up­dat­ing of ex­ist­ing leg­is­la­tion to meet these new re­al­i­ties." For those im­me­di­ate­ly cu­ri­ous about how it's been ap­ply­ing its learn­ings to its own cloud-based prod­ucts, the com­pa­ny has es­tab­lished the Mi­crosoft Trust Cen­tre Web site (http://ow.ly/eDX­Uq), where it open­ly dis­cuss­es its prin­ci­ples and prac­tices on pri­va­cy and se­cu­ri­ty for the da­ta it man­ages on the cloud.

It's worth a look even if you're on­ly a con­sumer lev­el user of Mi­crosoft's cloud-based of­fer­ings, be­cause the com­pa­ny has re­cent­ly an­nounced changes to the way it makes use of user da­ta in its prod­ucts.

Vil­ma Vil­lalo­bos has her own suc­cess sto­ry about the ef­fi­cien­cy of Mi­crosoft's cloud ser­vices to tell. A na­tive of Cos­ta Ri­ca, she was stunned to learn of the dam­age wrought on Sep­tem­ber 5, 2012, to her coun­try by an earth­quake mea­sured at 7.6 on the Richter scale. The quake dam­aged more than build­ings, it col­lapsed the coun­try's com­mu­ni­ca­tions in­fra­struc­ture tem­porar­i­ly and cit­i­zens turned to the Web to get up­dates from, among oth­er sources, the Web site of na­tion­al tele­vi­sion sta­tion Telet­i­ca.

The site was im­me­di­ate­ly swamped by de­mand and col­lapsed, but Telet­i­ca had a se­cret weapon. The com­pa­ny had re­cent­ly im­ple­ment­ed Mi­crosoft's cloud so­lu­tion, Azure, to han­dle a spike in de­mand for a lo­cal tele­vi­sion tal­ent broad­cast. Telet­i­ca col­lab­o­rat­ed with Mi­crosoft to scale its In­ter­net ca­pac­i­ty with Azure to suc­cess­ful­ly meet the surge in de­mand. "I was so proud of my coun­try that day," Vil­lalo­bos re­calls, "and hap­py that Mi­crosoft could help."