Here Be Dragons…
“The cloud” refers to the common practice in network diagramming of identifying infrastructure which we neither maintain, understand nor accept responsibility for with the shape of a cloud. This cloud symbol is commonly used to represent connectivity to a wider Internet which, to the vast majority of the interns tasked with creating a network diagram after the actual engineer has left the building, was indistinguishable from magic anyway. Effectively the cloud symbol is the modern equivalent of the cartographer’s practice of filling in inconvenient white areas of the map with declarations of, “here be dragons”.
Galactic Hitchhikers will recognise the cloud symbol as a type of SEP field. Far less messy and expensive than actual invisibility, the “Someone Else’s Problem” field achieved the same effect by utilising the viewer’s natural tendency to ignore things they didn’t understand. The sheer scale of infrastructure required to support the Internet was so inconceivable, the mind could not accept it. Thus, drawing a cloudy line around and ignoring it entirely came completely naturally.
Then, twenty years ago, businesses began exploring Tim Werner-Lee’s nascent “web”. The journey most often began as a marketing exercise. Make my brochure “globally available” they said. A cottage industry of young technologists began setting-up shop to provide “tele-presence” to those businesses. IT departments were content to consider these third parties, and the exercise as a whole, to be somebody else’s problem, making it – for all practical purposes – invisible.
“It’s the marketing departments problem”, they assuaged. And if anyone had the temerity to belabour where these systems were located or how they actually worked, the IT department would sigh deeply, get out their network diagram, point at the cloud symbol and say, “in there”. Critically, this meant that these services were hosted in server farms – rather than on-site – and so became part of “the cloud” in the IT departments network diagram.
Initially furious at what they saw as a distraction from their core role of making high quality power point presentations, marketing departments across the land assumed responsibility for web sites. After a while – and some initial successes – however, the marketing department pointed out that there seemed to be a lot of people in black tee-shirts hanging around the office, drinking gallons of coffee and hardly contributing to the power point presentations at all. Why not just put all the internal IT stuff “in-the-cloud” as well they asked, and replace all the black tee-shirt types with people who properly understood the value of power point presentations (and had good hair)?
“Shut up”, explained the IT department. But by that point the finance department was already printing out the cost benefit analysis of “co-location” and “software-as-a-service” and the writing was on the wall for many of the black tee-shirt types. On paper the finance departments plan was brilliant. Rather than developing and maintaining their own systems they’d buy the same services run on someone else’s computer. For a monthly fee all the hassle of having black tee-shirt types hanging around the office would be somebody else’s problem, and – for all practical purposes – invisible. The savings in coffee alone would easily justify the business case, it was decided.
This worked really well at first, despite the continuous moaning from user types that everything was now either painfully slow or stopped, as all the actual data processing occurred off-site at speeds that would have embarrassed two yoghurt pots and a bit of string. But the number of power point presentations had increased dramatically and important sub-committees had been formed to explore options for the best corporate font and the most “web-ish” shade of blue.
But then there was “the problem”. This was usually a hideous security event, or a vital feature that wasn’t available off-the-shelf, or simply that the whole mess of interconnected third parties had collapsed under its own weight. Sometimes – though fortunately quite rarely – it was a user type going postal with the office stapler, after losing the same document to a laggy connection for the 16th time that afternoon. Suddenly therefore the companies found themselves once more inundated by black tee-shirts types – though now wearing suits and charging eight times their previous rates in consultancy fees – and, occasionally, medical personnel with surgical plyers.
Eventually however, companies got wise to this wheeze when one wily tech start-up began offering file deletion “as-a-service”. “Send us your data and, for a fee, we’ll delete it for you”, they offered (ISYN). “Perhaps we could delete our own files?” whispered someone in a black tee-shirt, sotto-voce and half expecting to be summarily outsourced in retaliation for his interruption of the power point presentation. Fortunately, a decision maker overheard the suggestion, and after much reassurance that, yes, we would have the technology to delete our own files in-house, the idea of “Private cloud” was born.
This, ultimately, meant moving all the really mission critical services back under the companies’ roof and connecting the users directly to their data with infrastructure that didn’t require 24 hours’ notice of a service call, or lag out 5 times a day. Selling this solution to the marketing department looked like it was going to be a problem at first, until someone pointed out that renting a web service was, from the marketing departments perspective, no different to running the same web service on-site. Also, cheaper and faster internet connections had made it more cost effective to host these services in ways that would still allow off-site users to connect to them.
But the real clincher came with putting “cloud” in the name. The millennial snowflakes in the marketing department loved that, and, as they had no real idea what it had meant in the first place, were simply content that the user types had finally stopped screaming and that they could get back to making power point presentations and the really important decisions about which font to use.
Cautiously – and after some initial reluctance – office managers even began allowing the gradual re-introduction of stapler rights for more senior members of staff.
In conclusion, on a recent holiday “in-the-cloud” (ironically, a week I spent without a single bar of signal), I was reminded that sometimes, there really are dragons.
Written by:
Simon Barnett
Head of UK integrations
Medatech UK
To find out more about Simon click here for our management page