Speaking in Clouds
As I kick off this blog from my hotel room in Las Vegas, there are few clouds in the sky. The morning sun radiates through the desert dust kicked up by the activities of a million people. The pale yellow sky sits above the tall wings of the casinos and the dark, flat shadows they cast on the shorter buildings below them. Thus, without any physical clouds drifting by to offer themselves as models, I’ll have to use my imagination to think virtually…which, of course, makes perfect sense.
“In the cloud” has become a term of art tossed about perhaps a little too easily by vendors, VC-backed start-ups, IT information strategists and lately journalists in the non-IT, mainstream business media. In a sense, the idea is to connect the unknowing with the all knowing: Users and/or developers can execute whatever they need to do – on mobile, laptop or other devices – while up there on some cloud the necessary computing power, scalable software and expert professionals respond without users or developers having to know how it’s getting done.
The business arrangement may remind the grizzled veterans among us of timesharing, but keep in mind that this is 2009, not 1969. Today, few have even heard of green screens. Users expect rich interfaces and some ability to personalize and customize the services; and to succeed, the computing environment in the cloud can’t waste any of its precious resources. Providers of the cloud computing services will have less and less tolerance for sloppy software that doesn’t use resources efficiently. At the same time, we will surely see a spike in demand for tools that enable real-time performance monitoring, analysis and response to problems inside and outside the clouds.
In other words, most of today’s systems can’t just be put inside a mass of water vapor or frozen crystals (thanks, Wikipedia) and called “cloud computing.” And there’s more to cloud computing that simply “pay as you go” models, aka software as a service (SaaS). For this reason, cloud computing could spur innovation even beyond the important developments centered on virtualization. To satisfy users’ demands, database architectures, for example, may have to make more creative use of memory-based and near-line storage as well as search or other programs that are different from the query style of SQL. As well, organizations will have to devote greater attention to business rules, policies and governance issues related to information sharing, privacy and quality.
Cloud computing is changing the vendor landscape. We now have “coopetition” arrangements between the likes of Amazon and IBM, with the latter recently announcing that DB2 works in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. IBM’s recent announcements from its Blue Cloud Initiative focused on Tivoli for managing data centers set up as “private” clouds; John Foley of InformationWeek offers a nice analysis here. Other vendors big and small are adjusting their strategies based on how strongly they believe the market will be for cloud computing and where they can take advantage: in other words, the marketing pieces are still in motion at Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere.
Many bloggers have referenced the useful analysis recently published by researchers in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I recommend reading this document, even though it won’t be the final word on this still-developing phenomenon. I will be using my vantage point in this blog to explore and examine where the clouds are going, particularly as they relate to information management, business intelligence, analytics and policy directions for information governance. Yes, even on a cloudless day in Las Vegas.
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