Docandersen&#8217;s Blog

Over the years I have argued that the internet will have a burp moment. As my boss used to say years ago an “Ah #$#$ moment.” One of those moments wipes out 20 atta boys.

The impact of the burp will be significant. As someone who think about the future I wonder if the impact won’t actually slow the overall adoption of cloud computing. The reason I am thinking this right now is that the burp will cost some companies and some people some amount of data.

What they lose will not only be the data. Hopefully everyone understand the concept of backing up their data so it will be the confidence in the system that is lost.

That confidence is in the end the risk of the overall system failure. That people will no longer see the internet as “all being” and instead come to realize that like anything built in a Hodge-Podge manner the reality of failure is greater than the reality of success.

You throw enough bailing wire and chewing gum at something and eventually it will cease to work the way it did before. Add into that the rubber band effect and you have a nice little destructive burp.

It won’t start out large of course. It will start out as a small error in one segment or two possible. Perhaps for people to take me seriously I should put this into a Nostradamus type quatrain.

The ends will weaken

the middle bow

and the great beast know as the internet

will bow to the pressure

and collapse

You can see the ends weakening now. The drops are greater today than the were 10 years ago. Of course the potential content is also greater therefore of course the drops are greater. But reality is it doesn’t take a lot of water, just a weakness in the wrong levy at the wrong time. Where is that levy on the internet? Which one will break first?

.doc

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To find a path when the light is dim…

23 01 2012

The concept of “personal clouds” isn’t new. Its been floating around for the past ten years. Just like the concept of cloud computing itself it has nudged the edges of IT and IT thinking for the past decade.

I think it is time for the personal cloud concept to change. In my book “The Syncverse” I proposed a set of changes that would allow your personal cloud to represent both what you needed as a professional/partner etc., as well as what interested and intrigued you. With a level of intelligence built into the solution knowing what you were using (device) and where you were (bandwidth) to determine what to move.

Such a system would require a series of over rides that would support users being able to change their preferences and settings on the fly (I really need this information is the example of a required system over ride).

The problem with the dream? It would require infrastructure that wasn’t owned by a company. That leaves the government and frankly that would reduce the value of the solution. Which means that we would need to consider my already proposed internet policing agency as the place that would host the “Myverse” as outlined in “The Syncverse.”

My first assumption is that there is some value in this dream. That may be more of a leap than I should make but it is my starting point right now.

The second thing is that you could create a policing agency (like the UN) that wasn’t wholly bound to the sponsoring nations. The UN is highly limited today because of its overall need for money from other organizations.

Perhaps the Internet Management Agency (IMA) or the Internet Policing Agency (IPA – also a great beer) would be allowed to “taxes” as part of the overall usage model that would allow it to abstract itself from the governments that sponsored it.

.doc

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To find a path when the light is dim…

23 01 2012

My first assumption is that there is some value in this dream. That may be more of a leap than I should make but it is my starting point right now.

.doc

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What lies beyond cost for cloud computing?

22 01 2012

Part of any good solution is the overall mapping to what the business needs and what the solution provides that maps to and hopefully fills that need. In many cases in the short run many cloud solutions have an easy row to hoe, they simply throw out the costs savings card and all is good.

Many if not all cloud solutions in the next couple of years will save money. From the ability (that you have to design in and for)to have your data and application in multiple data centers to the more complex abilities that I’ve talked about before (Portable, Application Intelligence, Flexibility, Elasticity etc.).

The reality is we have two problems in the short run. The first answer I have is to the problem of confusion. I created a blog series and now a podcast (which will hopefully become a series) on the concept of the Cloud Whisperer. Someone who could cut through the marketing and provide the solid answer they organization was looking for in the first place. The Cloud Whisperer representing an almost super-hero as a service solution.

The second problem is broader and will probably have a larger impact.

Beyond cost why go to the cloud?

The US Federal Government has decided to head down the FedRAMP process for certification of solutions. This means that organizations wishing to sell their solution to the government will be required to have that solution checked by a third party. This “check once run often” solution is very different for the US Government. For that matter having dealt with a few governments over the years it is in fact a new way to deal with the problem of vendors and solutions.

IT does not however answer the question of what lies beyond cost. For that we may have to polish our crystal balls. The first market I see beyond cost, is cloud as a platform for two things.

Big Data
Security

The second of these, security has a broad market (let’s 100%) the first is smaller but may have a greater short term economic impact, as proper implementation of a big data solution in the end could reduce security risks and provide security information much faster than it is available today.

The question that I am left with today and have been for awhile is simply what lies beyond those two? They seem pretty straight forward, I suspect they are good requirements for many organizations. The reality is they aren’t for everyone. What else can we consider in this space?

Its what I think about nearly every day…

.doc

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Oh for the days of yesteryear…

21 01 2012

Simplicity.

It is the core of portability. That my solution will move to “your solution” easily. Programs that are smart enough to evaluate the end solution and easily provide what is required for portability.

No fuss, no muss.

I started my IT career as a helpdesk person. When you are supporting another human being as they struggle with a solution it changes your perspective (I highly recommend all starting IT professionals consider beginning on the helpdesk). You become that persons lifeline regarding the problem they are having.

Moving on in my career I became a mail person. I started my first migration (MS Mail to MS Exchange) in the middle of a merger. I went from a simple mail system to a complex unstructured system that became a complex massive system. CC Mail. Lotus Notes, MS Mail, Microsoft Exchange and SMTP mail all converging on one spot and then routing to other places.

I long for the days of simple. 32 post offices connected by a WAN and dialup. Novell servers that talked to one and other only for that purpose, moving mail. Machines built around the concept of code optimized for 8 and 16 bit operations.

You didn’t have forty gig mailboxes back then. You didn’t have cable modems and fiber optic lines at home either.

Life was simple.

Well, it felt simple.

Because of the complexity we have before us in the IT world now, portability is a pipedream. Someone has to stitch together a miracle solution that in the end will only work for the specific point in time solutions it was built for. The very “portability” solution becoming less than portability when applied to other problems.’

Simplicity.

.doc

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To be portable

20 01 2012