With Innotech just hours away, we were lucky to get an interview with Kevin Gough, senior product and marketing manager for Google. Gough has been responsible for launching various business search and collaboration products, including Google Apps, the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini and Google U.S. Government Search. Previously, Gough was co-founder of and director of sales and marketing for SSB BART Group, a software and consulting company that helps make technology accessible to people with disabilities. Contributing blogger, Matt Scherer completed this online interview with Gough.

Q:: Almost everyone has heard of “cloud” computing. Yet, few of us truly understand it. What is the impact of cloud computing on the average user?
The cloud is really about more convenience for the average user. The key feature of cloud computing is that both the software and the information held in it live on centrally located servers rather than on a single user’s computer. That way people can access the information they need from any device with an Internet connection — even mobile and hand held phones — rather than being tied to the desktop. You can work from anywhere. It also means lower costs, since you don’t have to install software or hardware. So you can see how the cloud is more convenient. In addition to that, the cloud is good for
business.

Internet-savvy people today are used to posting and sharing photos online, instant messaging, and interacting online for a good chunk of their spare time is having an impact on expectations in the workplace. By reducing the traditional costs and labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading business technology, IT departments are freer to work on projects more strategic to their business. And since software lives in the cloud, it can be improved as often as needed without tying up the IT department or inconveniencing users. This “versionless” software eliminates a lot of the time and resources spent on upgrade projects and helps technology keep pace with the
speed of business.

The average user can also collaborate in the cloud in ways you can’t with traditional software. Instead of sending countless copies of a document to a large group, for example, you can just give each person access to the document in the cloud. They can all edit the same document at once, and you can keep track of changes without losing the most up-to-date version. That means users can stop emailing documents back and forth and trying to determine who has amended which version. It makes working on shared projects that much easier for employees.

Q: If I were shopping for a new computer system, how should I evaluate the storage merits of a hard drive if I’m wanting to embrace this new concept of cloud computing?
It depends on how you use your computer. Now you can do many of your daily tasks- from email to word processing to photo editing- in the cloud, so you don’t need to worry about disk space for those applications and the files associated with them. That accounts for the growing popularity of thin client PCs. That said, even those of us who live in the cloud still have uses for hard disk storage for things
like editing movies, at least for now…

Q: I am sure you get a lot of concerns from customers about the security of data in their cloud. What is the Google attitude on security?
Great question. Here at Google, nothing is more important to us than the security of our users. Security is one of the most important factors we consider when we develop products like Gmail and Google Docs — it’s built into the DNA of our products. This starts with the physical protection of our data centers, the measures we put in place to prevent network attacks, the application environment itself, and, most importantly, the procedures for deploying secure code. In addition, with Google Apps we create a virtual firewall around an organization’s data, giving the administrator the choice of which users and applications are permitted and how data is shared. We plug into an organization’s authentication system, giving them control over access to the system. We trust Google products so much that we run our own mail and document data on Google Apps, using the same infrastructure and applications we develop and deploy for our customers.

Google’s systems for managing and storing data are going to be more secure than most companies’ enterprise systems.

Q: What kind of technology and development applications does cloud computing bring to the developer community?
We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest and work being done by developers, and we work closely with them. Earlier this year we announced Google App Engine, which is proving to be a really useful tool for developers. Google App Engine is a web-hosting platform that helps developers build highly scalable web applications on top of Google’s computing infrastructure. Developers and start-ups have had huge headaches trying to run their applications securely and at scale. Google App Engine bundles the tools Google uses internally to host our own apps and offers them to the world. We are committed to advancing the web/cloud as a development platform and Google App Engine is technology that helps developers build really cool cloud-based apps for the world to use. Similarly, we have open APIs for all the applications in Google Apps, which allows developers to extend, customize, and integrate our services.