Has the WebOS Finally Arrived? 227
SphereOfInfluence writes "Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet declared in a new post that the Web OS has finally arrived and that businesses and IT departments must adjust to the fact that everything's starting to move to the cloud. He cites John Hagel's so-called big business shifts of the 21st century and claims cloud computing, crowdsourcing, open APIs, Software-as-a-Service are the future of the workplace. He goes on to present a compelling visual model of the Web OS circa 2009 and examples to back up some of the statements."
Flashing lights and the death of crap IT (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a phrase about IT
"We don't understand the hardware, we don't understand the software... but we can SEE the flashing lights"
This has led to a whole load of crap IT dedicated to neither hard-core hardware or to hard-core software, its the land of the PHB and its the land of the powerpoint. What surprises me about clouds however is that its often the hard-core folks who are scared of the cloud, they bitch about security and latency but really its because they fear it will make them less important.
It doesn't.
What clouds do is hugely commoditise infrastructure and (in the case of SaaS) those massive package implementations that customise to death a package that would have worked much better without all that consultancy "help".
The people who should fear clouds are the ones who lived off customising packages that didn't need it and who revel in a world of powerpoints and meetings because what SaaS and clouds do is shift the buying of crap boring IT into the hands of the business and then leave the business with the real questions of how to deliver the stuff that actually matters... the hard-core software and genuinely high performing infrastructure.
So don't think of clouds and SaaS as a threat... think of them as kicking the PHB and his expensive package customising consultants in the nuts.
Backend mining (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I'm a frustrated crook or security consultant.
Re:Some issues with "the cloud" (Score:1, Interesting)
My concern with any outsourcing is that the company hiring the outsourcers have a contract that protects your data with severe civil liabilities for the outsourcing provider if there is compromise. These can be fines that are agreed on which not just cover the cost of paying for customers ID theft protection, but compensation for sullying of a good name.
Even with the most bulletproof contract, a firm is not safe. If a cloud storage provider gets bought up, or gets liquidated and assets sold off to another firm, that new firm may have the ability to use the stored data in any matter they choose. Someone ahs stored a critical trade secret for refining oil which gets a significant more usable yield? It is shared with the new owner of the defunct cloud provider and not protected by trade secret laws because the client company explicitly chose to store the info with them. Your critical customer lists? Off to be sold to the highest bidder. Customer private E-mail addresses? Some phishing organization in Elbonia wouldn't mind a copy for 50,000. And there is not one single thing the client company could do about it. The data was authorized to be present, so computer "trespass" laws do not apply.
I can see a dedicated niche industry forming that does one thing with cloud based storage -- providing an encryption layer on the application or the API level. This can be something as simple as using one AES key and a simple AES encrypt filter, piping the output to the cloud API. Or it can have multiple hierarchies of keys and certificates to allow recovery in case of disaster or people
Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT (Score:5, Interesting)
They're turning their business over to the mercy of the cloud provider, and should it go down, the entire business may go with it.
Don't forget massive asymmetry problems. At a past job I helped "support" outsourced email for small businesses. Basically, the same thing as gmail but more expensive, yet not expensive enough to drive them away to gmail, in retrospect a fairly pointless line of business.
In one memorable unhappy situation, a customers email access from China, in a very email centric line of business, was worth "thousands of dollars per day of revenue" to them, and it was down, and they were very unhappy. They were worth "approx fifty cents per day of revenue" to us. Guess what happened due to that massive asymmetry? I think they eventually went out of business.
Where I live... In a city of 30k people (Score:4, Interesting)
... the Internet is not available at high enough speeds for cloud computing to reflect anything close to using software on my home computer.
That doesn't mean I can't wait for it if its something that we're all moving to anyway; I'm just trying to bring up the obvious fact that there is lag in web apps and for some of us it might be a bit harder or longer process than others.
I'm ready to pay the $6/household that the major ISPs said it would cost to double bandwidth. I'm ready to pay it several times over. Is anybody listening?
Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT (Score:1, Interesting)
A certain canadian Pharmacy chain has 2 unix servers at each store and a smart router that can automatically switch between Satellite uplink, two DSL modems, and two dialup modems. The reason for this... their POS controller server stops working if it can't reach the DNS server at head office to resolve the till names. I'm not sure how the 4 hour restore contracts on their satellite uplink, DSL, and dialup (all different providers) are cheaper than running tertiary DNS servers on their "ISP" and "POSC" (their names for their servers).
Companies like that should fear the cloud. And other companies should learn from their mistake.
Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT (Score:4, Interesting)
After all, who would not want a "private cloud", which is sort of contradictory, no?
A "private cloud" makes no sense at all in a 50-100 person company. But when a company has tens of thousands of employees all over the world in dozens of different markets (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Cisco), they make a lot of sense. Departments often need temporary computing services, but have no choice but to buy a server to handle it. The server then goes to waste when the temporary job was done. When a company is large, it is difficult to coordinate the use of computational resources and this leads to inefficiencies.
I worked for a company that would create installers for the software for dozens of different languages. Each one of these installers would need to be tested at release time (about every 6 months). There was a dedicated machine that had all the relevant software to do this testing. This machine would get used for a week or two every six months which is a complete waste. A cloud environment would allow the server to exist as an image and then you would instantiate the image on whatever free machine happened to be in the cloud.
Looking back on my career, there are many times when I would have loved to be able to go to an internal web page, request a machine, upload a preconfigured virtualized image and had a departmental server up and running with no bureaucratic headaches. If I decided I was done with the server, I could just release it and the hardware would no longer be wasted and I would know that I could restore it at any time with a few clicks because the image would still be around.
Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is, you're not their parents. You're an employee of the business, as is your department. Your job is to facilitate what they do, not to do what you think is right, you don't generate any revenue, they do.
That doesn't mean you can't raise concerns, point out hidden costs(including jail time for some things), etc, or that there aren't some circumstances where "no, we can't do that because ...." isn't the right response, but in the end, while you might be the custodian, it's their data, and you've got to do what they ask you to do wherever possible.
Being a dick and thinking you have the right to control what they do with their data is probably one of the reasons you don't get asked until the end in the first place. I've been driven up the wall by business requests too, and I've seen more than my share of absolutely idiotic ones, but the reality of the situation is that IT doesn't own the data, and the role of IT is to make the business work better, and that's really the end of it. Anything you do which doesn't result in improvements for the business(compliance with legislation/law suit protection is an improvement) is waste, and while a certain amount of waste is unavoidable, it should be minimal.