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Is Cloud Computing a Benefit or Threat? Tom Nolle / Internet Evolution | April 30, 2008 The biggest threat to the Internet as we know it may be developing out of the very reason why the Internet has been so successful. The focus of Net neutrality has been primarily on keeping the access network providers from getting too much control, but we may be risking the creation of a more fearsome monster in the cloud computing market. If we imagine a true computing cloud, a virtual data center with a million or more host systems linked in some way, with literally trillions of bytes of online storage, where is the information we're looking for? Today, that place is usually a data center somewhere, a fixed location with a fixed address, but would it have to be? It doesn't matter as long as the "cloud" can somehow find it, somehow get some processing and information storage linked to our information needs. From the perspective of the user, cloud computing could be applied seamlessly to pretty much any Internet experience -- without changing anything about how the browser interacted with the cloud/Internet. But inside the "cloud" the protocols and processes could look totally different. We have to distribute work, link processes to data, and link both data and processes to the users who have made the requests for service in the first place. (Article continues below)
Sure, we could use TCP/IP and other Internet protocols, but IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) could also build clouds out of things like mainframe channel extension over fiber, and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), and Amazon.com Inc. may have their own visions. Might the "Internet of the future" be something that looks like the Internet of today only in the way users get access to it? We should care a lot about this, because the "giant cloud" vision of the Internet is probably not an alternate Internet architecture for all to play in, but rather an alternate Internet business model that favors only the giant players. It doesn't take a computer scientist and a VC to create a Website, but it darn sure takes a bunch of both to create a computing cloud. You could host your site and applications in somebody’s cloud, but how they work and what it costs you are now under their control. The notion of a cloud-computing-based Internet is the notion of an Internet that's tilting toward the very large players. Gee, isn't that what's also happening in broadband access and mobile Internet? The capital cost of laying fiber to deliver wireline broadband or buying spectrum and deploying cell towers for wireless broadband keeps even some giants like Google out of the access market. Suppose the cloud guys and the access guys get together? Could we end up with an "open Internet" consisting of a dozen major providers, and if so, how "open" would it be? Some of these questions have now been raised in the Net neutrality debates, so the problem is real. Bits are getting cheaper every year and there is no shortage of equipment vendors or new technologies to keep that trend moving forward. Content is another matter; that’s where the real money is. Wrap content deals in cloud technology, create some access partnerships, and you could create an "experience industry" that has more power than the current Hollywood studios or TV networks or search engines because it could be the sum of them all. Standards won’t help protect the openness of this new “cloud space.” There’s an Open Grid Forum, but it doesn’t really guarantee that the cloud, or grid, will be as “open” as the Internet. Somebody needs to do that before we make a truly transforming change in how the Internet works. CLICK ON THE BANNER TO BUY TERRORSTORM IN |
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