Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Here I am at Camp Granada ...
Well actually, not quite, I'm currently on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with my family. (Well strictly speaking my family is on vacation there and I've sneaked up to NY for a couple of days to catch Deutsche Bank's FinTech 2008.)
Anyway the point is that in Florida the weather is a major topic of conversation and a more or less permanent feature of local news bulletins particularly at this time of the year which marks the start of the hurricane season. In fact, there is already extensive coverage of the first hurricane of the season - Bertha - although this looks like being nowhere near as severe as its namesake from 1996.
Of course the joke is that the English love to talk about the weather (if you don't believe me check out online English primers such as the English Club!) which in the UK is pretty benign whereas in this part of the world - Florida, the Bahamas, the Caribbean and so on - knowledge of what the weather is doing or how it may develop can mean the difference between life or death.
In the short time we've been been in Florida there have already been some spectacular storms which got me thinking about Cloud Computing. Sad but true.
The background to all this is that I have been following the debate led by William Fellows at 451 on its merits and relevance to the enterprise which he addresses in his latest report Partly Cloudy - Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing. (Unfortunately I will still be on holiday but you can catch Will at the upcoming Cloud Camp London organized by the guys at CohesiveFT.)
So where have I got to in my own thinking? And here I have to confess that I was unusually skeptical when Cloud Computing first surfaced having lived through Grid and then Utility Computing yadah yadah. My concern is that the half life of a marketing concept is now so short that you barely have time to flesh out one and start to ask the really interesting - and tough - questions before it becomes passé to even talk about it!
Well, looking beyond the marketing hype and continuing in the same vane (sorry that was awful even by my standards!), my view is that without adequate climate control and ultimately the ability to control the weather resistance to Cloud Computing will dramatically slow its adoption by business, for example, the financial services industry which would be a huge lost opportunity.
In short the key to realizing the benefits of Cloud Computing in the enterprise is to implement robust service governance to ensure that it is utilized in a tractable, compliant way i.e. by enforcing the appropriate operational risk management policies.
On that topic more anon and hopefully a demo before too long and definitely by HTS 2008 in Vegas. For now it's time to get back to my vacation.
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