What would this French theatre writer make of cloud. Well if we explained to him all the history of computing and the way man had suffered through the pain of broken computers, software bugs and whacky ideas that sputtered to an inglorious demise, he may liken medicine to our technological fevers.
For sure technology has given us many ills. We all remember being told that the screen in front of us will solve all our problems. Even after a few bangs on top of the VDU and a life saving ‘patch’ from the white coated IT guys, we are still led to believe that IT is what we need. Whilst the language may have changed to API, XML and Wi-Fi, there is still illness amongst us.
But what of the remedies? Well IT people have built a ecosystem of vendors and consultants all ‘experts’ at selling you the remedy to any particular illness we are suffering, think we are suffering or being told we are suffering by the IT sales person who keeps pestering us.
Many doctors may testify that the modern man is a victim of his own curiosity as he browses Google for clues on the headache he has , or the unexplained pain he woke up with. This curiosity develops into obsession as man strives to find the perfect remedy. He will listen to people at the bus stop, colleagues and ultimately, believe faceless on line health experts who will sell him a cure for only $50. Fast forward to IT people and you will see the same display of desperation and unconsciousness as they seek answers to a specific issue.
I remember when fault finding and problem resolution was a technical competency. You either had it or you didn’t. You couldn’t find tens of different answers on some random web site. No you had to know. Now you don’t. You can get a remedy off the web and within 5 minutes have deployed the fix. and when it doesn’t work you try a different remedy. You keep going till eventually you (1) fix the problem but without knowing why or (2)you lose your job.
Well Cloud is the beast of all remedies isn’t it? I mean all our IT illnesses are solved for good by taking the cloud remedy. Lets list our illnesses to see how amazing a remedy that cloud must be to fix all our issues.
- Cost – we are dying from spending so much on IT
- Security – we are being battered by security breaches and data theft
- Service – our service desk is being hammered by end users demanding retribution for poor response times
- Data – is the one that will kill us because we don’t know where it is, what it is and how we can get it back
But Moliere may concur that without really understanding what is wrong with us ( our illness ) we are taking a big risk by moving to the cloud ( our remedy ).In fact he may further concur that an ill-informed decision to go to the cloud ( web research, car/IT sales people, friend of a friend) will actually be the death of us. This death will be slow as all our illnesses get worse – we spend more, we are less secure, service drops and our data is still out of control.
Like a government health warning, we should be telling ourselves that Cloud can seriously damage our IT health.
( Quote attributed to Molière (1622 – 1673) was a French theatre writer, director and actor, one of the masters of comic satire.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moli%C3%A8re )
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Paul's Blog 
I sort of relate to the title of this post.I manage a mid size service desk in London. We are moving a number of apps to the cloud – public and private. I am told to manage the service across these clouds and I have big worries about SLAs and oversight. Does anyone have suggestions?
FERN ( London )