Cloud Computing: As Computing Tasks Evolve, Infrastructure Must Adapt
June 11, 2014
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Roger Kay.
The litany of computing buzzwords has been repeated so often that we’ve almost glazed over: mobile, social, cloud, crowd, big data, analytics. After a while they almost lose their meaning. Taken together, though, they describe the evolution of computing from its most recent incarnation — single user, sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard, watching a screen, local machine doing all the work — to a much more amorphous activity that involves a whole new set of systems, relationships, and actions.
The single user becomes a collaboration among people. The desk becomes a car, plane, back deck, conference room, or hotel. The keyboard becomes voice or data inbound from other connected systems. The screen may still be a screen, but it could be a bigger screen, or a smaller screen, and it could be a voice, or an action, or a command sent somewhere else. And the work is being done everywhere: on premise, in the cloud, by people, and by machines…
At IBM’s Edge conference last month, the company shared some of its research with attendees. A few startling data points: 40% of people socialize more online than they do face to face. I suppose all I have to do to gut-check that one is observe my own kids. Others pertained to the increase in shopping via mobile device, the move by companies to adopt cloud computing for both cost and competitive reasons, and the explosion of unstructured data. Unstructured data, by the way, in case you’re not a computing wonk, is any digital information that doesn’t fit neatly into a parseable database. When people in the industry talk about unstructured data, they’re usually referring to things like tweet streams from Twitter or “like” patterns on Facebook…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2014/06/11/as-computing-tasks-evolve-infrastructure-must-adapt/