By
Tim Young
Leave it to a buzzword to destroy a perfectly good concept.
You like minimizing the amount of trash and pollution you create. You don’t want an awful lot of petroleum to be burned on your behalf. You like the idea of treading lightly on the Earth.
Then someone goes and decides that makes you “green”.
Then you look around and realize that EVERYONE has decided that they can figure out some way to express that they, too, are “green”, no matter what color they actually are.
Before you know it, you’ve gotten to the point where you’re almost embarrassed to even utter the word because it has become attached to so much empty hype that it’s almost cringe-worthy, and you’re forced to consult your thesaurus for a better term to describe your chosen lifestyle.
It’s unfortunate.
And it’s not just being “green” that isn’t easy (with apologies to Kermit the Frog). There are roughly a zillion buzzwords that have become so overused that they have started to be stripped of their intrinsic meaning, and not just in the technology space. “Viral.” “Grunge.” “Maverick.” The list goes on and on.
And, unfortunately, “cloud” is on the verge of being added to that list.
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Microsoft and countless other companies have been leveraging the cloud for years. |
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In fact, it may have gained too much traction. Data Center Knowledge posted a video relatively recently (March) of Rackspace’s Lew Moorman decrying the dangers of cloud fatigue in an address entitled “Hype or Reality: Quit @#$%ING SAYING CLOUD!”
However, within this same talk, Moorman hits on the heart of why we spend so much time on the cloud. No, “cloud” shouldn’t apply to EVERYTHING, but for those applications for which the title is apt, cloud is “cheaper, better, and more reliable”.
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But not because it can’t describe something very real and very promising for CSPs.
And not because it’s anything particularly new.
At the recent TM Forum Management World in Nice, we were barraged by the “cloud” and all of its attached possibilities.
However, it was in a group meeting with Microsoft and Convergys that MS Telco Sector Managing Director Terry McGuigan pointed out just how not new the concept of the “cloud” is.
Microsoft, and countless other companies, have been leveraging the cloud for years.
Hotmail. Xbox Live. These are all cloud services.
However, even if this is neither an entirely new concept nor an entirely new technology, the ubiquity of the term “cloud” to relate to SaaS, PaaS, etc., has gained considerable traction in the last 12-18 months.
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And that’s certainly a compelling lead-in. “Better” is fairly subjective, but doable. “Cheaper” is a definite plus and can certainly apply to cloud solutions.
“More reliable”? That’s possible. But there have been threats to the overall reliability of the cloud.
Amazon’s EC2 is a great example. Just a month ago, the cloud solution experienced a chain of multiple outages, including one caused by a car slamming into an adjacent power transformer and a subsequent failure in transfer protocol.
A few months earlier, EC2 got hit with a one-two punch, as a power outage and a botnet attack hit the service in the same week.
The cloud is attractive, in part, because its distributed nature is supposed to make it less susceptible to common threats, and customers facing outages due to the Zeus virus and wayward automobiles raise serious concerns about the stability of the cloud.
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