8 Governing for Uncertainty
This chapter covers
- What organizations can govern today
- Which problems still lack reliable solutions
- How standards and tools may make governance easier
- How to make decisions while the technology and law keep changing
In March 2006, Amazon opened an online storage service called S3. Months later, it introduced EC2, which let developers rent virtual servers through a web interface. A company no longer had to buy, install, and control every machine its systems ran on. Computing could be obtained from a provider through software, as demand arose.[1]
That convenience unsettled a familiar map of responsibility. When a server sat in your data center, its location, custodian, and perimeter were at least visible. In the cloud, the hardware belonged to someone else, several customers shared it, and the evidence came from the provider. Who patched what? Who could reach the data? How could you show a regulator that controls were working on machines you could not inspect?