Shifting shape of the cloud benefits users

NEXT year it will be 50 years since the Rolling Stones told the world: Hey, you, get off of my cloud. That protest against society being overly ordered would not be out of place today, except it would refer to cloud computing and the privacy challenge it poses to personal data.

The bad news is that we cannot escape the cloud — any time we connect to the internet, make a credit card transaction or use our phones, we are adding to the vast volume of activity-based information being collected and collated somewhere. The concept is generally referred to as “big data”, a buzz phrase that really means we have more data floating about than we had ever imagined possible.

The good news is that the cloud is not a single, pervasive entity, but rather a massive range of services being delivered from data centres dotted around the world. The better news is that cloud technology is evolving so fast that its precise shape will soon be decided by the business or even the individual using it.

Until recently, there were only two choices: the private cloud that is hosted in a data centre on behalf of large enterprises or at the company’s own premises, and the public cloud in which mere mortals store their mail, photos or documents on sites such as Gmail and DropBox.

Then came the hybrid cloud, which combines the two and allows companies to be more flexible. The problem with this approach, however, is that it tends to add enormous complexity to decision-making and the management of a company’s cloud deployment.

The cloud, and storage itself, is now evolving once more to address the need for a better way. The world leader in data storage, EMC, used the theme “redefine” this week to drive home the message at the EMC World 2014 convention in Las Vegas in the US.

The company’s chairman and CEO, Joe Tucci, said businesses had to change the way they operated and that individuals in those businesses had to change the way they thought about data.

The most fundamental shift is that the structure of data centres — and therefore the cloud — will no longer be dictated by hardware. Instead, they will become “software-defined”, which means the management systems running the data centres and the applications that can be used to access and analyse data will no longer be dictated by hardware capacity and limitations. Rather, the needs of the customer will dictate what can and cannot be done in the cloud.

Two of the new products and services launched by EMC this week give some idea of the big change under way right now:

Elastic cloud storage appliance, which is a “hyperscale”

The structure of data centres will no longer be dictated by hardware

cloud storage infrastructure — it can scale up automatically as storage demand increases — that EMC says will deliver the ease-of-use, agility and cost benefits of a public cloud with the control and security of an onpremise private cloud; and

ViPR 2.0 software-defined storage, which is a system that automates storage infrastructure, simplifying the management of data and underpinning the kind of future applications that will be essential for analysing big data.

These products are designed to work with a wide variety of cloud systems from a range of vendors, including those of competitors. This means customers can design and build their own cloud, choosing the elements that best meet their needs.

In the future, such products will be so readily available and easy to use that even individuals will build their own cloud.

Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editorin-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter @art2gee