In the wake of yesterday's FBI seizure of servers, it is interesting to note that one of the industry's most seasoned executives, Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm, has been anticipating just such an eventuality for a while.

In a SYS-CON.tv Power Panel recorded on the eve of Cloud Expo New York, he spoke of exactly this scenario. Malcolm was speaking alongside fellow executives Terry Woloszyn of PerspecSys and Andy Burton of Rise.



Asked about transparency and other current matters, Malcolm noted that the public cloud side of things is not where the bulk of cloud computing is going to be. The enterprise is only just beginning its move to the cloud, he said.

Then came precisely the question of compliance and of the possible downsides of cloud computing. And Malcolm specifically talked about the FBI.

In the wake of any breach, such as the recent one involving Sony, "Some issues arise when it isn't your data center," noted Malcolm [if you view the interview here, this comes at approx 16:00  in the video].

He continued:  "If I as an enterprise put my IT out in the public cloud, who else is there? If you don't have control of the data center and who else is in it?"

"The FBI is presumably inside the Amazon servers used to carry out the Sony attack, trying to work out what those guys are doing. What does that do to the whole picture?""

So what Malcolm calls "the power of self-service" also has its possible control-loss downsides. Just ask users of the data center in Reston, Virginia, leased by a web hoster in Switzerland called DigitalOne! (See this story for more details.)

• Perils of the Cloud – FBI Seizure