I attended Cloud Camp Boston yesterday. It was a great meeting with some good discussions. Several hundred people attended. What struck me about the general session (when all attendees were present) was that there was a lot of interest around data in the cloud. For example, during the unpanel (where people become panelists in real time), 50%; (5 of the 10 questions) that were up for grabs dealt with data in the cloud. Thats pretty significant.

• How do I integrate large amounts of enterprise data in the cloud? (answers included various approaches; more traditional to new vendor technology were mentioned)
• How do I move my enterprise data into the cloud? (answers included ship it FedEx on a hard drive and make sure there is a proven chain of custody around the transfer)
• How do I ensure the security of my data in the cloud? (no answer that deserved its own breakout session)
• What is the maximum sustained data transfer rate in the cloud? (answers included when it takes a server down, no one knows, but a year ago someone mentioned that 8 gigabytes a second took down a cloud provider)
• How do applications (and data) interoperate in the cloud? (answers included that standards need to rule)

There were some interesting break out sessions as well. One the aforementioned security (and audit), another an intro to cloud computing (moderated by Judith Hurwitz), one about channel strategies, and a number of others. I attended a break out session about Analytics and BI in the cloud and again, for obvious reasons, much of the discussion was data centric. Some of the discussion items included:

• What public data sets are available in the cloud?
• What is the data infrastructure needed to support various kinds of data analysis?
• What SaaS vendors offer business analytics in the cloud?
• How do I determine what apps/data make sense to move to the cloud?