At today’s PDC keynote, Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, a cloud-based platform for distributed .NET web offerings and SQL based data. It reaches into the same space as Amazon EC2 and the Google App Engine, but it provides these services to the masses which are using the Microsoft development platform.

As someone who develops for a public sector agency that deals with sensitive (legally protected PHI and other personal) information I see a couple different barriers that will probably mean I don’t write any sort of Azure software anytime in the near future. The first is a concern, almost a paranoia, about privacy. Government agencies that deal with individuals’ health records or protected criminal history information (think juveniles) are going to be justifiably concerned about transmitting and storing that information in a hosted environment. Yes, there are security protocols and encryption and a bunch of technological solutions which can help ensure data integrity and protection, but there is a significant pyschological barrier to overcome.

The second issue will be one of (lack of) necessity; many of the line-of-business applications simply don’t need the reliability or availability which are some of the most compelling reasons to move to a hosted datacenter/cloud model. A site such as SmugMug can effectively utilize hosted services to maintain a high level of reliability (at an affordable price) for thousands of customers, but large number of smaller intranet applications aren’t likely to be cloud candidates.

It’s an exciting platform. I’m sure I’ll play around a bit. I love the idea of being able to write .NET codes and deploy to Azure. I’m just not sure that it will play out as a business scenario for government.

[tags]azure, windowsazure, pdc, pdc2008, .net[/tags]