A few years ago, Ben Lieber, a lawyer from Washington, D.C., began noticing a new trend in town. “There were all these highly educated, experienced women lawyers who had had kids,” he says. But when they tried to come back to work, things weren’t working out. It’s the kind of thing you hear about a lot in professions like law, which used to be dominated by men but aren’t as much anymore. To Lieber, it seemed like an opportunity. “I thought, there’s all this high-end capacity that’s idle. And these are women who don’t want to be idle,” he says.

So Lieber founded a firm composed almost entirely of such women. Opened two years ago, Potomac Law Group leans heavily on cloud technology and is itself a kind of cloud—a constellation of 40 lawyers who went to the best schools, trained at the best firms, and are now working, mostly from home, to their own schedules, for about half the price bigger firms charge.

That, in a nutshell, is the promise of the next wave of the cloud. If the first generation of cloud technology was about IT—about offsite e-mail and office software—the next will be about offsite everything else. Smart companies will tap cloud computing and use it to create their own clouds—of professionals and experts and services—that they can offer to clients for lower prices and with better results than what’s out there now.

It’s working well for Potomac. The firm has a small office in Washington, just down the street from the White House. But almost none of its lawyers work there, which keeps infrastructure costs down. And instead of the expensive billing software that big firms use—which Lieber says can run to US$1,000 per lawyer—he uses a cloud system that costs $30 a head. By farming out legal work to Potomac’s cloud of lawyers, big corporations are getting expert work done at a fraction of the price.

Potomac is only one of the many companies worldwide that is expanding our idea of what the cloud can do. Toronto law firm Skylaw is also tapping a cloud of outside experts to offer a much wider array of services than a boutique firm could normally boast. “Let’s say we need employment lawyers or tax lawyers—instead of trying to keep them in house, what we do is [bring them in] on a project basis,” says founding partner Kevin West.

This isn’t just happening in law, either. Brightsquid, a Calgary startup, is now offering cloud services to dentists, allowing specialists to share patient X-rays and data with general dentists through secure servers. Tunezy, a Toronto startup, gives musicians a platform to sell everything from meet-ups to personalized birthday songs for fans. This new generation of cloud company could potentially offer something to any kind of business. The question now, then, isn’t so much ‘What can you export to the cloud?’ as it is ‘What can’t you?’ And, maybe more important: ‘Who will leave you behind if you don’t?’” – Richard Warnica

Security consultant Stuart McClure was recently contracted by an unnamed client to try to hack into a newly constructed office building. All of the systems in the complex—electricity, lighting, heating, security cameras—were wirelessly controlled. After only a single day of work, McClure and his team at his California-based security firm, Cylance, gained access to the entire building. “We could do anything and everything,” he says, including shutting off the power and disabling the security system. “It is so easy to attack this system you have to laugh.”

Such a hack was possible in the first place thanks to the proliferation of wireless devices. More and more products are getting some form of wireless connectivity, from your thermostat to your car to your television. Connecting everything to the Internet has its benefits (see No. 22) But as McClure’s story shows, it’s also opening the door to a whole new set of security threats.

At the extreme end, researchers from the University of California and the University of Washington have demonstrated ways to infect automobiles with viruses. One piece of malicious software actually allowed the researchers to disable or slam on a car’s brakes remotely. Other researchers hacked insulin pumps and discovered they could deliver a fatal dose to the owner.

While frightening, such scenarios are far-fetched. The vast majority of hacking takes place for commercial gain, such as when PCs are hacked to send out revenue-producing spam e-mail. Today, that could theoretically happen with your gaming console or smart TV. Security firm McAfee is working to tackle the problem, and has developed a few prototype devices that, once plugged into a router, can monitor every Internet-connected item in the home for such attacks.

At BlackBerry’s January launch event for the BlackBerry 10 operating system, CEO Thorsten Heins proclaimed, “We will be the leader in connecting you to your Internet of Things.” And the BlackBerry 10 operating system could indeed power devices beyond smartphones and tablets. The data sent to and from these products—an implanted medical device relaying vital signs to a doctor, for example—could theoretically be routed through BlackBerry’s network, which is renowned for securing sensitive data. “Our competitors actually can’t secure the data and personal information the way we can,” says Sebastien Marineau, senior vice-president of engineering. “So we’re really leveraging our security DNA in BlackBerry 10.”

Gus Papageorgiou, a technology analyst with Scotiabank, wrote last fall that BlackBerry is better equipped than many to take advantage of machine-to-machine communication, in part because of its security expertise. “No organization is going to want to take on the legal liability associated with an M2M solution that cannot be secured,” he wrote.

But the technology is proliferating faster than worries about security for now, and as McClure’s building hack shows, not every manufacturer is taking the potential threats seriously. “They’re just starting to look at what it takes,” he says. – Joe Castaldo