Cloud Computing Is Like the Food Industry and Needs to Behave the Same Way
It was a big day today for cloud computing. At least it certainly seems that way after two of the most egregious issues witnessed in cloud computing service provisioning, both emerging in the past 24 hours. I feel compelled to make some comments in response to the events of Distribute.IT’s catastrophic and irrecoverable data loss and DropBox’s temporary lapse of control over their security system, allowing any user’s password to access any user’s account.
Let’s first of all recap what happened.
- DropBox had an incident they described as an “Authentication Bug” resulting from a code update released that allowed any user to log into any account using any password. The security hole was open for almost four hours.
- Distribute.IT, who provide web hosting services had what they described as a “deliberate, premeditated and targeted attack ” on their network. This impacted pretty much their entire business infrastructure and four major servers were irrecoverably lost including all “production data, key backups, snapshots and other information that would allow us to reconstruct these Servers from the remaining data.” The upshot: more than 4800 customer websites, data and email reservoirs eradicated.
CIOs, Systems Designers: Users Have to Have More Say…
Long gone are the days when software implementers could foist arcane or cumbersome software onto users. While some businesses still develop specific vertical products for all sorts of business purposes, the reality is a vast number of systems can be replaced by generic tools that feel natural and extend the utility of the typical user in ways that are almost impossible to foresee without witnessing crowd action. Synergies will emerge when a system is ubiquitously adopted across specialisations, across functions. Perhaps people will be able to react more quickly to emerging trends, perhaps knowledge is more easily accessed, perhaps the customer experience is so greatly enhanced that they evangelise and become disciples.
One thing we have learned from the emergence of social media tools is that building applications inside or around frameworks like Facebook, Chatter, Twitter etc have remarkable spin offs that are difficult to predict. Read more
Things I Want to See – 2. Salesforce Page Layouts with Multiple Related Lists per Object
One of the beautiful things about Salesforce is the ability to create or modify an object’s structure with defined relationships, permissions, application contexts, business rules and page layouts.
Think about it for a second: how many frameworks do you know of that enable you to modify the data schema and automatically set:
- Relationships between objects;
- Indexes;
- Cardinality rules, (definitions of how objects relate to each other in terms of how many of one can be related to how many of another);
- Business rules, (what fields are mandatory, what fields are dependent, default values, what fields are read only or even visible for certain users, which fields must be unique);
- Referential Integrity rules (which records will be deleted when a parent is deleted);
- A User Interface, even one that can be different for each user profile;
- Application context (which objects belong together to form a sub application;
- Access to reports; and
- A Notification engine that can share changes with subscribers or record owners, or handle task assignments.
And all with a point and click interface – no programming required (unless you want to), and all with defaults to allow you get the job done quickly. Very quickly. Read more
Things I Want to See – 1. True Cloud-based Email
This article is the first in a series of articles looking at changes/improvements I would like to see happen. You will find them categorised under the category “Things I Want to See”, and also filed under specific vendors where appropriate.
An increasing number of people are coming to understand intuitively the difference between traditional peer-to-peer document sharing modes where multiple instances of documents exist, at least once on each client machine. You know the drill, you attach a document to an email, the recipient opens the attachment, edits it, saves it and then attaches the saved new version to a new email and sends it back. Before long, there are multiple copies of the document and it can be difficult to know how the document evolved. In the case of several people, it can even be difficult to know which version of the document is the current one. There may not even be one single latest version, as two people may edit two different earlier versions at once. Stitching these all back into a master document is not easy.
A lot of tools have been developed to simplify the potentially incredibly complex task of managing all these document versions. But the cloud provides a simpler way, by fundamentally only having one document location. So instead of linking people to people, you link people to documents and the problem elegantly goes away:
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| Traditional Document Sharing | Cloud-based Document Sharing |
Focus on the Vision, not the Means
“Knowledge is a single point, but the ignorant have multiplied it.”
(Baha’u’llah: Seven Valleys and Four Valleys, Page 25)
When we don’t really understand something, we see division, we see dichotomy. We see the things that differentiate and we hone in on them, creating opportunities by exploiting these differences and in so doing we limit our thinking, our judgement, our potential. We become experts and protect that expertise by making it difficult for others to gain the knowledge we have. Knowledge is power, having more knowledge than others gives us an advantage.
It usually takes one visionary person to challenge the basic assumptions that lead to these differences, and when that happens, entirely new vistas open to us, empowering those who were shut out by providing access to the knowledge or exposing the differences as being false divisions, false barriers to entry.
Computers are like this. In the very early days, only people trained in the arcane would be able to (or want to) access a computer. A computer operator had to be able to read ticker tape, write in binary, then assembler, then Fortran. Screens and keyboards made computers more accessible, and then graphical user interfaces hid much of the complexity.
Programmers have been able to work with increasingly high abstractions, but still we haven’t really been able to get away from the need to be able to program, or to purchase tools that hide this from us – tools that automatically do backups, convert file formats, transfer data, dial the phone, send communiqués or whatever.
This seems to be changing very quickly – increasingly it is becoming possible for people to choose to configure existing systems rather than being forced to find a programmatic solution.
What is interesting here is the trap this represents for some people on both sides of the fence – those that understand how to program and those that don’t. Clearly the people who focus on the end objective, rather than the means of getting there, will adapt as technology becomes increasingly available to non-programmers. These outcome-oriented people have a distinct advantage.
Those who only see the barriers will continue to use old methods. End users will remain in fear of the unknown, while programmers will continue to look for programmatic solutions, even when both are presented with tools that can get the job done without code.
Cloud Computing makes it easier to facilitate the kind of advances described here, advances that empower end users to achieve change without programmers. This is because Platforms and Software delivered as a Service typically mean there is only one version of the platform or software in use by everyone – it is literally impossible for anyone to get left behind. Vendors can work to cover a lower common denominator because it is worth their while. Salesforce.com is a great example of this.
The bottom line: Those that focus on the technology will be left behind in a world where we were slaves to technobabble. Those that focus on what they want to do will realise the rules have changed and will be astonished at just how far they can take their vision without breaking a sweat.
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