I have a thing about data integrity. Maybe it’s from my time as an editor in the early days of what we used to quaintly call “pagination,” i.e. desktop publishing writ large.

In an era of the 300-baud modem and Quark Xpress 1.0, I was responsible for devising a process to automate the data collection and pagination of the sports pages for a mid-sized daily newspaper.

The Rube Goldberg-esque process I cooked up hinged entirely on string after string of code that converted the electronic text into PostScript and then into beautifully tabbed box scores, line scores, game summaries and all the other arcana that the rabid sports fans of New England demanded daily.  In other words, I had to make happen by myself something that until a year before had taken four union typesetters 16 man-hours to accomplish.

‘For Want of a Nail’
And I did it! But it left me scarred, and deeply appreciative of data integrity. That’s because if one small character was off, the whole enterprise was ruined.

This is why I was especially interested in Steven John’s expert opinion this week. Steven offers this guidance for CIOs thinking about cloud computing: “You must have your own house in order: your data must be structured and clean, your integration layer robust.”

As distributed computing pundit David Linthicum noted in an article on ebizQ recently, “The lack of integrity controls at the data level (or, in the case of existing integrity controls, bypassing the application logic to access the database directly) could result in profound problems.” When it comes to cloud computing, Lithicum says, reliance on “the application logic to handle integrity issues on behalf of the database” may not always be well-placed. 

Blogger Peglarr takes a look at cloud storage in a recent entry at Cloud Slam Events:  “Too often, we assume that storage arrays receive, store and retrieve data flawlessly. Studies have shown otherwise…” But, he asserts, the Data Integrity Field storage standard should help. “It insures not only the data itself is protected, but that the addresses of the I/O are correct - after all, you don't want good data at the wrong address in your cloud storage.”

Put it to the Test
And, of course, you can’t overlook network security concerns. “Prior to moving any data or applications to the cloud, it is essential to take stock of the current state of internal network security,” writes contributor Michael Cobb at SearchSecurity.com. He suggests you test your network security by first developing and experimenting with internal or hybrid clouds.

How about you? How much focus have you applied to data integrity when thinking about a move to the cloud?