I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday about the cloud. He’s at a technology company in the backup business. Backup is a simple concept that insures that data on corporate networks is recoverable in the event of disaster. Backup is good. (I recently learned that Jewish religious scholarship is passed on orally over 7 years of study, known as the Daf Yomi, which is a form of backup. Just sayin’.)
Does cloud computing make the need for backup less important? Of course not, for cloud providers it’s requisite. But for tech companies that provide back-up solutions to corporations, does backup in the cloud become a competitor? Most certainly.
This cloud thing, done well, will chance the tech landscape by amazing proportion. And redistribute crazy wealth. Recently, it was reported in The New York Times that a company spending $1M with Amazon’s cloud service to host and process its data would have had to pay $5M for all the servers and surround. Como se no brainer? And more importantly, as we bury all the complexity in the cloud and organically move toward more open systems, will not technology become less confusing? Less elitist? I think so.
When that happens, out engineers will be able to start solving energy problems, space exploration, and healthcare delivery. Now whose head is in the clouds? Peace!