the cloud by another name
At the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford this past week there was an interesting debate. This debate has been an ongoing one in the tech industry. It took on a new conversation during the two panels about "the cloud," How are Hot Private SaaS/Cloud Companies Moving from Cloud 1.0 -2.0 and How are established players competing in Cloud 2.0. (note: links are to the archive video footage courtesy of @ViVuTv)
As the discussion began it was clear there was no agreement on which was a better model "public vs private clouds". One panelist said he had to look up the term and realized that we were really just talking about data centers. Some people knew this debate when it was about walled gardens, others know it as the Internet versus intranets, and yet another group knows it as open vs closed networks. No matter how you slice it, it is the present day cloud but known to some by another name.
These name changes can include or exclude "experts" on this debate. Some times the confusion of the debate is just about the terms alone. New companies and leaders join in with no knowledge about the challenges of the past and old leaders bring the behaviors of the past into the current debate as a piece of legacy.
In our current era of social media this debate has an interesting twist. These data centers (clouds) hold all of our personal content and information. This includes Facebook, twitter, & etc. and if you work for the government or some corporations the private aspect is now called Enterprise 2.0. The big issue is security, privacy and who ultimately owns and controls the data.
There wasn't a final answer to this ongoing debate and I don't see an end to it any time soon. However, one take away is that we will all be using both the public and private cloud as one panelist mentioned, a form of hybrid. (we don't have a name for that yet) However Kaj Van de Loo said it best:
I'm never sure why we need to choose one or the other. I love the flexibility of having the option to choose both or either. One of the responses from the panelist included the concern about when you (the customer, owner of the data) wants to take your data and go, will that be possible?
How will you be able to port all your data to which ever data center (cloud) you choose like your mobile telephone number. Portability is the last stand in that debate and that is the technology of the future of which I have a keen interest.
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