Today's Cloud: Garbage; Tomorrow's?: Insanely Great

Paul Murphy chose to highlight in his blog this week the topic of cloud computing. He's got a very negative view of it since the recent Gmail failures highlight that any cloud service, even run by a well-known and resourceful company can fail. It goes back to that fundamental belief that if you don't have control over the service, you're subject to random outages that can cause your organization significant dollars. The Gmail incident was sobering in that the outage was for a rather extended time period, making the incident all that more costly for anyone depending on it. It's a good reminder why we use appliances, and why IT departments tend to manage their own servers and services like proxies and web gateways.

There is one spectacular piece that Paul Murphy links to in his blog and that's this 8 minute video of a speech of some new technology that's being worked on at MIT. It's not really related to this blog (only peripherally), but it is phenomenal and well worth the time spent to view it.