Cloud computing – the infrastructure for the vision of a contextualized icentered paradigm
In a ubiquitous world, who needs siloed fences?
Cloud computing begins to emerge as the infrastructure of choice not just for crunching very complex computation challenges, scaling up storage or managing distributed financial transactions. Commercial cloud services, social cloud based networks, open public clouds will evolve to serve in real time any business or data process, not just for big data centers, but as a direct infrastructure for web applications aimed for the end user market. It is the best suited infrastructure on which the vision of a contextualized icentered web paradigm can materialize.
The real value of the cloud exceeds by far the financial benefits of not having to invest huge sums in IT infrastructure or scaling up. It lies in the array of on demand based applications that can revolutionize many businesses through Saas offerings. When computation and connectivity are pervasive, commoditized, perceived as a basic utility like electricity or water, when terms like ubiquitous, always-on, real-time, dynamic, instantaneous, pervasive will be at the heart of all information services, it would become natural to develop an open ended approach to data retrieval.
The fragmentation and distribution of information and interaction sources in siloed sites of distinct providers is counterproductive to our interests as users, namely facilitation through simple, intuitive, adaptive modes of interaction and the ability to reorganize data flows in personal or topical strings, according to individual needs or interests. Imagine being able to organize ad-hoc strings across sites or social networks, a social graph around an event, a prismatic view of a news item, comparative and informative shopping queries, personalized search related results, open ended work information queries – all individually rearranged, according to the personal context, relevance, history or predictive forecasting for each of us.
The cloud as an on-demand service infrastructure is robust more than any siloed data center of an individual company. It empowers mashing up the infrastructure and the applications that run on it and the creation of data strings across distributed sites. It will allow the creation of new kinds of user bound services that will exceed siloed sites, and empower more sophisticated mobile applications.
From an icentered point of view – where will my data reside? In the cloud, dispersed in all the sites I interact with and harmonized under the umbrella of my inclusive profile. The ubiquitous nature of the cloud will allow accessibility through all media and sites, agnostic to the origin of the data’s residence. When I can access everything from everywhere, storing materials, retrieving them, collaborating, sharing and creating food chains around them, will become a non-issue. Localization loses its meaning for both data retrieval and the whereabouts of the user or device storage and computation limitations.
The big shift from push to pull mode, as analyzed by David Siegel, automatically shifts the wheel from content providers who put their offerings out there, to the users who actively pull, agnostic to where what they pull resides. Once companies adjust their businesses to the pull mode, empower account and profile portability, harmonized contextualization can start to take place.
Once data referencing schemes and tagging systems enable to pull any data and contextualize that around a personalized scheme, there is very little difference between pull of services, content and products and pulling of personal data, creation of new food chains and building companies that pull, reorganize and capitalize on the pulled data on our behalf. Data stream services will extract relevance based context strings for a specific query/service/offering. Contextualization processes, delivered by business process software through a cloud based delivery mechanism need contextualization platforms and applications – but all these cannot develop without a ubiquitous, open ended, flowing infrastructure that empowers portability and accessibility through any smart device everywhere.
Once my data and interactions reside in the cloud, I, the user, become free to access my personal files, connectivity and content, consuming files from any point – fully materializing John Gage’s vision of “the network is the computer”. New kinds of providers will emerge, giants wars over hegemony of the clouds infrastructure and providers of new food chains and services. It will truly facilitate an Itom based new long tail models based on data aggregated from different dispersed sources, and facilitate new personalized services.
It will empower an icentered culture, since the ubiquitous infrastructure available through clouds is bound to enhance new generations of web services, using pay-per-use models that will empower individuals to do things that previously only corporates could offer, due to high costs of storage, retrieval and data manipulation. More people will be equipped with more tools, a larger portion of our life will become digital, unique individual needs, personalized eco systems will ”float” in clouds.
At the same time, cloud computing brings with it privacy apprehensions that need to be addressed. The fact that everything is always-on, available and accessible does not mean that it is automatically exposable as well. Pervasiveness and total publicy do not automatically go hand in hand. Total availability and manipulation of data from wherever, whenever and however still must leave me, the user, in control over what to expose to whom, when, in what context and in return for what. The non tangible conceptualization of an ether like cloud out there does not provide the mental security of a sealed data center whose owners are accountable for retrieval breaches from their data storage facilities.
Therefore cloud service providers should be accountable for their protection levels of data stored in their clouds in the same way that banks are accountable for the security and safety of assets put in their trust.
