Sunday, December 02, 2012

SoMoClo outlook for 2013

One of the futures of computing and the futures of cloud computing is the the hookup between mobile technology, social media and cloud computing. The three concepts are complementary to each other from a technology point of view and  combining social media concepts with a mobile (and location aware) platform and bring the storage and computing of data streams to the cloud to enable a always on computing backbone delivers a quite interesting new concept. A concept which enables companies to quickly tap into a B2C market segment and quickly and for low costs build pilot projects and tests to test the SoMoClo concepts.

Every company starting a SoMoClo concept will have to be aware that cloud computing is the basis of the SoMoClo concept. One of the main reasons is the flexibility of cloud computing. You can quickly ramp up and down computing resources and you have the advantages you can quickly adopt services from other cloud enabled companies who do provide API's to their functionality. Every company looking to start a SoMo(Clo) project without giving the CLOud part a good look will make a very big mistake and will most likely have (A) have a unsatisfactory RTO (B) a disappointing group of users and (C) a failed project.

The Aberdeen group has the following statement about this:
The rate of transformation in IT is the fastest it has ever been, and increasing almost daily. The rising number of cores on processors allows the compute capacity of servers to grow dramatically. With faster local and wide area networks, servers can be placed anywhere. The amount of data stored by organizations is doubling every 2 years. At the same time, new mobile computing devices are being deployed to end users, allowing them to work anyplace and anytime, with constant access to new forms of social media. These are exciting times, but where is this disruptive change taking us?Aberdeen’s Telecom and Unified Communications, Wireless and Mobility Communications, and IT Infrastructure research analysts have been watching these trends for several years and has observed a growing convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud computing. These three computing revolutions are creating a new computing paradigm. The future is a converged computing infrastructure, which Aberdeen has termed “SoMoClo” to underscore the integrated nature of this single overriding trend.

 


In a recent article by Scott Hebner at cloudtimes.org he got into how we can make SoMoClo ready for the enterprise. Scott is currently Vice President at IBM for Cloud & Business Infrastructure Management. Inteersting thing from this article is that it go's into a couple of things of making it ready for the enterprise world. On one side it go's into the how you, as an enterprise, should adopt SoMoClo technology to grow you business by using it externally and internally.

It also go's into the fact that your employees are already using it and you can most likely not stop the usage of it by your employees. Even though you might have policies around the use of public and cloud services it is very likely that if you have banned the usage of these services that your employees are using, for example, dropbox a lot. For this it would be good to not ban online and cloud service however to adopt them in such a way that you are able to channel them and make sure they are getting more compliant to internall rules and regulations.

If you ban your staff from using any online service it will most likely not work and your employees will use every service available online. However, if you create a policy that they can use this and this and this service however not THIS specific one due to some good reason you will notice that your employees will most likely accept this without any issue. It will bring issues with it however coping with those issues and problems will bring you more benefit in the end opposed to blocking the total use of it towards your workforce.

Interesting is that this is exactly the same discussion we have been having some time ago on BYOD (Bring your Own Device). In this it was Bruce Schneier, CTO of BT Managed Security Solutions who stated that he was seeing a big security risk in a BYOD policy however would never oppose to it as the benefits where so big to companies and users would do it anyway in they end that it would be better to channel it.

The same go's for the usage of Cloud, mobile cloud and social mobile cloud solutions. Your employees will be using it, are already using it. You can better channel it and make use of it internally an externally. The same go's for building your own SoMoClo, as you will see the adoption of SoMoClo applications is picking up with an every increasing pace your company can get a big benefit of a SoMoClo strategy if understood, adopted and executed in the correct way.

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