i wandered lonely as a cloud

relax, i'm not about to start waxing poetic about daffodils. rather i'm thinking about cloud-based anti-malware software.

it's something i've been thinking about for a little while now but i've finally decided to commit my thoughts to a more permanent format and share them with others.

for the past couple of years the major anti-malware vendors have been deploying cloud technology to improve the effectiveness of their products. often this has been an optimization specifically for their known malware scanners, although some have also taken the opportunity to build reputation systems.

it occurred to me that the cloud could be used for a great deal more than just that. think about what those reputation systems are doing. the user is faced with a complex question - is file X safe - and the cloud answers. the cloud can do this either because there are experts feeding the cloud it's answers or because there's a community feeding the cloud it's answers (or both, come to think of it). the point is that the cloud reduced the complexity for the user.

now think for a moment about all those technologies that have sprung up and then fallen by the wayside over the years. how many of them fell out of favour because they required too much knowledge, because they asked too much of the user? do you see where i'm heading yet? the cloud as a complexity reducing technology (alright it technically transfers and collates that complexity, but from the user's perspective it reduces it) seems like it actually has the potential to breathe new life in virtually all of those other techniques, be they sandboxing, whitelisting, behaviour blocking, or even integrity checking.

and of course, as i was originally coming up with that list i was reminded of the fact that many of them have actually been augmented with some kind of cloud technology to help take the complexity out of their operation. those efforts simply haven't been particularly mainstream. the biggest vendors have been slow to recognize the opportunity to augment these technologies (which can be superior in the right hands) with complexity reduction as a service. the smaller vendors that are taking a chance with this don't necessarily have the stability to keep it going. it would be nice if those other options saw more more mainstream deployment and adoption.