Sometimes it is easiest to explain something in relation to what it is not. Cloud Computing and “The Cloud” is one of those things.
Contrary to popular buzz and marketing hoopla, most Information Technology professionals today acknowledge that we are still on our voyage to discover “The Cloud” — we haven’t arrived yet.
So Cloud Computing is NOT simply server virtualization or parallel processing or off-premises hosting in a data center where anyone can store their things in “The Cloud”. It is a vision, an experience, a new way of communicating, discovering, interacting, and transacting… in short – a revolution!
That is why the Internet — origin point and basis from which “The Cloud” will emerge — is under such attack by established interests today. Governments, large corporations, mass media and all the other controllers or “powers-that-were” have finally woken up to the real potential of this change.
“The Cloud” is a platform which can truly enable free market economy — free from everything, especially the grasping and limiting hands of the existing oligarchy. Once we realize the potential of data and compute everywhere, seamless interaction, intelligent search-recommendations-discoverability, and any type of information or value transfer, “The Cloud” becomes an uncontrollable, easy to use ecosystem where people come together in direct Peer-2-Peer interactions without any mass institution having the power to disintermediate them.
Its pillars are:
– Digital identity privacy and security backed by 100% opt-in consent
– Access anywhere, everywhere without speed or cost constraints
– Seamless interoperability and true “plug ‘n play functionality (not the cumbersome manual integration that frustrates all of us today)
In 2014, the reaction of corporate oligarchies against the promise of “The Cloud” reached an all time high with major network service providers (cable and telcom) threatening to end the supposed “net neutrality” of equitable speed and access for any internet content provider, and start charging differential rates for different websites. This would mean that the websites of large corporations like pharma, the airlines, major hotel chains and so on would be easily browsed and used, but those of local businesses, bed and breakfasts, alternative medicine practitioners would be rendered so slow as to be effectively unbrowsable.
Hulu and Youtube would still be able to function, but only if they paid new exhorbitant rates to the network service providers. Which in turn would cause them to either charge their consumers or shut down.
Desperately trying to avoid the fate of content providers garnering some of “their” communication and entertainment revenue, the NSPs plan to use massive cost penalties to raise an electrified, barbed-wire fence around content creation and distribution on the Internet…globally. And the democratic / republican governments of the world have been lobbied so much that they are ready to allow them to do it! Regardless of the cost and disadvantage to the actual people of all countries who they’re supposed to serve. In 2014, this story is coming to you courtesy of the FCC of the United States of America.
Fortunately, the people of the world have already woken up and they are fighting back!