Secrecy Is Google's Achilles Heel In Battle For The Cloud

Google is trying to position itself as a more reliable IaaS provider than Amazon Web Services. But given that its cloud technology is proprietary, can it meet enterprise demands for openness and transparency?

Google is trying to position itself as a more reliable version of Amazon Web Services, which already has the lion's share of the infrastructure-as-a-service cloud market.

The search engine giant reckons that it has a unique advantage: namely, that its cross-datacentre technology allows it to move compute and storage loads around, creating a multiply redundant infrastructure that adds reliability. And given that Google co-invented Hadoop, the leading big-data platform, it should understand how to make such complexity work.

The first question is: does Google's technology work?...