To anyone who knows much about emerging technology you have probably heard much hype about cloud computing. Amazon.com jumped on the bandwagon early as did VMware. Cloud computing sounds wonderful because there is no need for local storage, as in hard drives. Devices can be smaller and cheaper to produce. Tablets and laptops can be made without a real underlying operating system relying totally on cloud infrastructure. They boot much faster and need much less memory. Your personal data is stored in this magical mythical "cloud" environment. No matter where you are, your data is always there with you. Sounding awesome so far isn't it?
Amazon.com being an early adopter got it's first taste of cloud failure. Their cloud crashed and tons of people had no access to their data. It was a nightmare for Amazon. This sounded the alarm to many who were considering the jump into the "cloud."
VMware has put all it's eggs into the basket known as cloud computing, risky and in my opinion faulted. They have a great implementation with simple management and redundant controls that can move data seamlessly between servers with no down time. I like V-Sphere but again, I won't adopt it either.
What these companies failed to realize is that people want a way to restore with backups if there is a catastrophic failure. Businesses absolutely DEPEND on that. It really isn't whether this can be done, it's about trust in having a hard copy of your data locally. Security vulnerabilities aside..people just want to quickly be able to restore when failures occur. Failures will absolutely always occur! Sure, you can back up everything locally but that defeats the purpose of storing everything in the cloud because you still need the hardware for backups. Why would a business double their cost just to be trendy?
It's not hard to see real life implementations of this failed experiment. HP recently released a tablet with a version of cloud computing they called WebOS and named the Touchpad series. They were ridiculously priced at $499, it was to compete with Apple's iPad tablet. In just a few short weeks, HP rolled over and gave up..this weekend they dropped support for them and sold them out for $99.
Google is trying their hand in the same market offering a Google Chrome OS laptop. It isn't being adopted because it is basically just a browser. All applications used are Google's online implementations, like Google Docs etc. Sales aren't what they expected.
Will the big guns online give up their experiment in the cloud? I think so eventually. They have a lot invested in it but with the price of hard drives dropping, I can't see why individuals or businesses would embrace the cloud. I haven't even mentioned the security issues involved with another entity controlling your data. Personally, I think it's a failed experiment.
No comments:
Post a Comment