I have been reading “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr recently, and felt compelled to blog about it. I usually stay away from books about computers (!!), mainly because they often get quite technical and therefore bland, and also because they are so quickly out of date. The books I mainly read are business books, preferring to read blogs and websites about IT that are both free, but also up to date.
However, I was recommended this book by a friend who wasn’t in IT, and who really enjoyed it – high praise indeed for a book about the Internet.
Usually, I do a quick “summary” of the book – but this is such a good book, with so many great points that I feel a summary would do it a great injustice. I suggest that you read it, especially if you are in IT.
What stuck me most about the book is the absolute certainty with which he writes about “Cloud Computing”. It’s not a case of if, but of how the changes will affect us. With help from some of the companies leading the move to the cloud (Salesforce.com, 3Tera, Sun, Microsoft, Rackspace, Cisco, Amazon, Facebook and the mighty Google to name a few) it seems that the age of the cloud is truly upon us.
For those of you who are thinking “What the heck is Cloud Computing?” please permit me to offer a simple (and therefore not fully comprehensive!) explanation.
You are used to turning on your computer, and your information being on your computer. Everything from your documents to your holiday snaps from last year are on there. But with the shift to the internet, then we are now used to more and more of what we use being on the internet, and not on our computers. A good example of this is Hotmail or Gmail. But increasingly there is a move to not just have e-mail on the internet, but a variety of other stuff. For example when you log-in to facebook, the information isn’t on your computer. The photos, feeds, messages, and all that makes up facebook is on the internet … in “the cloud”. And other services are the same – Flickr, Picasa Web, Twitter, Google Maps, Bebo, Google Docs, Wiki, Office Live, Live Mesh, and so on … and more and more applications are going to be “in the cloud”.
So, simply cloud computing is about having data and information not on your computer or company servers, but on someone else’s servers – in “the cloud”.
I have been thinking alot about Cloud Computing recently. In the medium to long term it presents a significant threat to my business. However, I am convinced that there are many opportunities that lie ahead for innovative companies. I thought that one of the barriers to Cloud Computing would be trust – but that doesn’t play out in my life. I trust Google not to divulge my e-mail messages, I trust my bank not to allow confidential information escape from “the cloud”, I trust the company that hosts my websites not to allow other people to get at it. Is this trust misplaced? I don’t think so – for reputations are important in this ever connected world.
I am convinced now, more than ever, that the move to cloud computing is going to happen at a fast rate – the challenge I face is how can I ensure that my company is helping others to make the most of all that the cloud has to offer?
