Well, not too often that a blog post will be titled in homage to a song by Russ Abbot….
I spent last Thursday at Google Atmosphere, a day long, business-focused event looking at cloud computing held just down the road at the Bloomsbury Street Hotel.
Key speakers included journalist Nicholas Carr, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, SalesForce.com founder & CEO (and force of nature) Marc Benioff and writer Geoffrey Moore (as well as quite a few Google bigwigs).
Many thoughts coming out of the day, some related to technology, but probably more about the increasing move of IT into collaborative tools and the challenges that lie ahead in managing this in organisations.
The single piece that stuck most clearly in my mind, though, was a comment during a panel discussion about the different models for availability and security in a Cloud world. At the moment, plenty of companies have plenty of incidents of failure and security breach, but because they are small in volume, we rarely hear about them. Overall, cloud will undoubtedly improve the average downtime per user, but there will be occasional problems that occur for Cloud vendors that, because they hit a large number of people simultaneously, will create a great deal of press coverage.
This situation was likened to the difference in risk between automotive transport and air transport. In 2004, it was estimated that 1.2 million people died as a result of traffic accidents, whereas 771 people died as a result of plane crashes. However, as a panellist commented on the day, airlines have a tendency to “kill people in batches”, so therefore every one of the 766 deaths would have generated relatively huge press coverage.
mmitII 