If you’ve looked at the storage market lately to get a sense as to the climate, it’s certain you’d find it’s cloudy, with some fog and a good amount of haze. There’s so much hype about “cloud” you’d almost think it was the turn of the century all over again (remember dot.com, SSP). It seems everyone sees a silver lining in the cloud, or maybe a platinum lining, but certainly opportunity. The challenge is that the concept is not well defined, much less is there a common understanding of what it is.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching and thinking about this since my current employer delivers enabling technology for the storage cloud. The “cloud” really seems to be about ubiquitous access and connectivity to a set of networked resources (public/private), which seamlessly scale based on demand for distribution of information. It’s not an individual product or technology, but a number of interconnected technologies that delivers a complete system. When I ran across the Wikipedia entry that says the term cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, it got me thinking.
The tech biz talks about cloud, streams and pools, as in cloud computing, streaming data and storage pools. What all these terms have in common is a relationship to liquid or fluidity of a system that includes all of these components. So then, perhaps the water cycle or hydrologic cycle is a better metaphor to use as it encompases a complete system. Water evaporates from the ocean to become vapor, which accumulates as clouds that move freely around the world. The clouds release the water as rain or snow. Runoff from rain is carried by streams or rivers and deposited in freshwater storage such as lakes or pools and snow is stored in solid state in glaciers and snow caps. Much of the water makes its way back to the ocean allowing the cycle to remain in constant motion.
Replace water in this metaphor with information and these two systems have very similar attributes. For water the cloud is an access and distribution mechanism delivering preciptation all over the world. Rivers and streams carry large capacities of water like optical fiber carries lots of information packets and bits. Lakes and glaciers are similar storage pools for information. The ocean is the largest store for water and the main resource for cloud creation. One could think of a cloud as providing the most ubiquitous movement of water from the ocean to feed the glaciers, rivers and lakes just like the Web provides access to an ocean of information (content) on the Internet to feed corporate networks and consumers alike. One could also look at the rivers and lakes as individual corporate networks that connect to the larger cloud and ocean (public network).
It’s not that I don’t think the cloud has relevance and value, but that I believe there is a broader context in which its value should be considered. As a metaphor the water cycle isn’t a complete corelation, but it does illustrate a near perfect system that flows effortlessly. In order to achieve a state of balance between business, information and technology it is necessary to take a holistic approach to determine how best to achieve objectives.
The point: Before making a decision on how the cloud fits your needs, consider how it aligns with your business. Also, it’s to realize that you need to get beyond the hype or buzz word du jour and evaluate the underlying technology to understand the benefits it can deliver within your own information ecosystem.
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