Computer Castles
Some people dream of castles in the clouds and others live in them. Smart people rent.
I’ve just gone through several days of cloud training and I am trying to get some perspective on it. I’m always looking for the story, the analogy, the metaphor to explain this to outsiders. To paraphrase Quentin Tarentino’s film Pulp Fiction, I thought I would go all medieval on it. It is a story of control and commerce.
Fifty years ago computer information was protected and available to very few. You went to an engineer in a machine room with a mainframe. There was an elaborate ceremony where you had to ask the right question the right way and even then you weren’t sure you had the right answer. It was expensive and slow. To me, these were the days of the priesthood and the castle. Outside the safe walls were chaos and ignorance.
Twenty five years ago personal computers were available to more people. You could get limited answers on limited machines using limited operating systems. Moving information was difficult and expensive. I think of this as the late middle ages. Castles provided areas of safety and trading fairs sprang up. The fairs gave way to permanent towns outside castles.
Now the web and cloud computing provide easy and cheap access to storage and processing. You can get virtually any information anywhere and anytime you want. To me this is the Renaissance. There is such a need for information and commerce that the walls (firewalls?) around the towns (datacenters?) must simply come down. City walls are no longer practical to protect your valuable information. You can keep something really valuable encrypted in the equivalent of a safe, but mostly you will be out in the world with a bag of coins purchasing what you need to run your business. In order to reach your customers you must get out of your castle.
Making the Call
Here is another analogy. A hundred years ago you had to have a human operator to make a physical switch to complete a phone call. It was expensive and slow. Fifty years ago phone companies began automating switching and you could dial direct without an operator. You had to dial a bunch of numbers and it was still somewhat expensive. Today the communication process is so automated you can call someone by clicking on one button. You can find out things with a phone you could not dream of a hundred years ago. Cloud computing automates things to the point where you do not have to have a team of system administrators or rooms of servers at your company.
Who is going to succeed in this new environment? The people who tear down their institutional walls the fastest and get the most business. The ones that can cut their expenses and communicate directly with their customers. Clouds can do that. You can do that.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
Posted by dj in Commentary []