Anna succeeds Professor Ross Jeffery, who has headed up this group and the original Empirical Software Engineering research program since NICTA was launched in 2003.

Ross doesn’t escape with a full retirement yet, and will continue at NICTA in a part-time capacity working on a couple of new initiatives, one related to defence procurement and another on software development practices in car manufacturing.

It was only about 6 weeks ago that I reported on Anna’s position as contributed staff from UNSW (although some months earlier than that when she actually started), so I don’t need to restate her background. Plus, there are more informed sources of her bio elsewhere.

The addition of Anna to this team in a leadership role adds a whole new collection of experience, capability and industry linkages that will bring extra richness to the future of the whole team’s work. I’m really looking forward to working with her and discovering new opportunities for industry engagement and impact.

There are several arguments driving resistance to adoption of cloud computing for corporate applications, but perhaps the most significant concern is the security and the privacy of off-hosted data. Ie., if the database holding sensitive and private customer data is on someone else’s premises, the risk that it could leak into the wrong hands is high(er than if we kept it on site).

I’m no security expert, but these concerns seem a little overblown to me.  Security solutions for remote sites and connections have been around for a long time, so this problem is not intractable.  And anecdotally, I understand the biggest risk to data privacy is staff misuse and social engineering – not the technology per se.  Couldn’t an argument be made therefore, that cloud-hosted data can be set up to be more secure and private than its on-premises version…?

There are other business issues that are at least as important for a large organisation to consider as part of their IT applications and services deployment and management strategy. It is the answers to these issues that I predict will pull the cloud movement very rapidly out of the Trough of Disillusionment and up the Slope of Enlightenment.  In particular, how do we determine which pieces of our entire IT portfolio are most appropriate to delegate to the cloud?  Which cloud platforms (if any) are able to provide the necessary quality of service and performance we and our customers require, and how do we select between the options?

These are some of the questions that we’re taking now from IT managers and executives.  And fortunately, we’re now well-qualified to start answering some of those questions.  Associate Professor Anna Liu, from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, recently joined our team as a part-contributed staff member.  Her team and ours are working together on use-inspired research into the performance characteristics of cloud computing services.  I’ve known Anna for about 10 years, since she was a research student with Ian Gorton (a former NICTAn himself) at CSIRO, before she became an Architect Advisor and Group Manager of Emerging Technologies at Microsoft Australia.  Anna’s capabilities strongly complement those of the rest of our group, and we’re looking to do some good work together, with particular focus on industry engagement, and a very definite view ahead to that Slope of Enlightenment.