Not all that long ago I put out ISBN-13 978-0-9770866-6-5 \u201cThe Minimum You Need to Know About Service Oriented Architecture\u201d. Some of you may remember that it won a 2008 Best Book Award from USA Book News. Apparently, not enough of you have read it because we are still seeing the standard criminal enterprises pushing \u201cCloud Computing\u201d and now they are even trying to push it to \u201cthe masses\u201d since they want the government to splurge trillions of your tax dollars on something that will not only contribute massively to identity theft, but bring George Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984\u201d to fruition.<\/p>\n
Back in the SOA book we had sections 1.1 \u201cSOA \u2013 Where We Came From\u201d and 1.2 \u201cThe Disaster We Are Headed Toward\u201d. In truth, it is probably these two sections which got the book its award. It is here that I told you the tale most of IT seems to have forgotten. Computers used to be massively expensive. Companies bought terminals with modems and leased time on bigger companies\u2019 computers. It was not unusual to have them lease accounting services on one computer system and order fulfillment on another system. CPU time was charged by the microsecond and storage space by the type and block. (Tape storage cheaper than removable platter which was cheaper than true DASD that was on-line all of the time.)<\/p>\n
During the 70s and inter the early 80s, leased time and proprietary packages ruled the land. It was not until basic mid-range computers got down to under $100,000 where you started to see a boom in the VAR (Value Added Reseller) market along with custom ERP and CRM applications. The time-share and leased application markets died before 1990. There were lots of big vendors trying to sell mega packages to the Fortune 500 with price tags only the Fortune 100 could afford.<\/p>\n
Then a horrible thing happened. They realized there were only 500 customers in the Fortune 500. Some package vendors caught onto this before others did. SAP put up their own Web site where small businesses could pay for accounts that would give them limited use of most\/all SAP products. The catch was that all of their data had to remain on SAP servers. Some small to mid-sized companies jumped at deals of $99\/month for full access, including payroll. Other vendors launched subscription sites for each module, Payroll was one of them early successes since many companies were already in the habit of subbing that out to companies like ADP.<\/p>\n
Of course, once we started taxing the network, companies found out they didn\u2019t have enough bandwidth. Buying all of the bandwidth one needed at peak meant paying for it when one didn\u2019t need it. Companies went from leasing T1 to a frame relay cloud system. In theory, you only paid for this small connection pipe, then \u201cthe cloud\u201d would allow you to use as much as you needed when you needed it and only charge you for what you used.<\/p>\n
Sound familiar???<\/em><\/p>\n Yes, just like the hapless cloud being shoved down business and consumer throats today, everything would dynamically adjust. You would only have to pay for what you used. In case you aren\u2019t old enough to remember those days, let me tell you, this \u201ccloud\u201d was about as successful as mud flavored gum. It was a complete frackin\u2019 joke. Nobody ever<\/em> got the bandwidth they needed. In fact, I never found a client that got more than the minimum bandwidth they paid for to connect to the cloud. If the entire thing wasn\u2019t criminal fraud, it was less than a nanometer away from it.<\/p>\n Today we have a new cloud. Once again, if it isn\u2019t outright criminal fraud, it isn\u2019t far from it. This has got to be a con which dwarfs the Bernie Madoff scam. You no longer have to include IT in your BRP (Business Recovery Plan) because all IT functions and support are going to be provided by this \u201cnew cloud\u201d built on the success (cough cough hack hack) of the previous cloud. Yes, the same scam vendors are dusting this baby off and like a good little Judas goat, leading the sheep to slaughter.<\/p>\n I covered this in detail, long before this new terminology hit the market in my SOA book. I won\u2019t outline all of the major disasters for you, even though, this scam could very well end civilization as we know it, but I will point out some issues for the casual user.<\/p>\n Myth 1: Collaboration. If you watch the commercials you are lead to believe that only with a cloud can multiple users edit the same document. This is pure ka-ka. Back in the days of the PDP and later the VAX, we had word processing packages like WPS and Mass-11. Multiple users could edit the a document at the same time. Those users didn\u2019t even have to be in the same country, just logged into the system (server) that was currently hosting the word processing software.<\/p>\n Myth 2: Storing your personal data on a cloud is a good thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. You wouldn\u2019t hand your birth certificate and wallet to a gang banger at the Mexican border and tell them \u201chang onto this until I need it again,\u201d so why oh why would you consider storing that same information on a system you don\u2019t own that has nothing more than Microsoft security? You know, the same security we are constantly reading about in the news due to identity theft breaches by Russian and Chinese organized crime. Just how liable are they if their \u201cbackup\u201d plan allows your data to be lost forever?<\/p>\n Myth 3: Storing all of your business data on systems that exist in unknown locations operated by corporations using the lowest cost labor they can find is a good idea. Yeah right. This is a financial fracking in the making that every share holder should be allowed to execute on the spot any CIO, CFO, or CEO who utters anything that even sounds like they \u201cmight\u201d be thinking about it. If they actually go so far as to write it down, you should be able to execute their entire family because those<\/em> genes need to be purged from the gene pool.<\/p>\n MBAs and accountants are, quite honestly, the stupidest people to ever<\/em> tie a pair of shoes. There is no polite way of putting it. These people routinely make decisions which kill innocent workers and throw national security to the wind. Each and every one of these buffoons falls victim to \u201ccrack dealing 101 \u2013 first hit is free.\u201d I\u2019ve been in IT over 20 years and let me tell you there are no exceptions to this statement, none what-so-ever.<\/p>\n How does it work? Quite simply, the Big 4 organized crime families of IT pitch Utopia to upper management. They tell them that if you use \u201cthe cloud\u201d from Vendor A, for $99\/month you will get all of the computing resources you need and<\/em> they will convert all of your existing application data into their applications and<\/em> they will train your business users. To top it off, once everything is converted, you can fire all of your IT workers and sell all of your IT equipment, not to mention those expensive UPS and backup generation systems. At current used market prices, that sale alone will pay for five years of the contract.<\/p>\n Ah\u2026\u2026management salivates\u2026.\u201dthe cloud\u201d is good. \u201cThe cloud\u201d is going to get them bigger bonus checks and larger stock options.<\/p>\n Of course, once all of the data is converted, and the IT equipment liquidated the \u201clow introductory rate\u201d will go away and the real<\/strong> monthly contract price will kick in. When the company negotiates the price down, they will get less and less service along with less allowed storage and fewer CPU minutes. When they want off \u201cthe cloud\u201d to either user another vendor\u2019s cloud, or bring things back in-house, they will find the outbound conversion work costs $800\/hr and takes however many hours they say.<\/p>\n In the mean time, all of your private accounting and customer data has been stolen from \u201cthe cloud\u201d by Russian and Chinese organized crime units and your cloud vendor won\u2019t bother to tell you. Don\u2019t be surprised if you only learn of it when you read an article about it being for sale.<\/p>\n Ah yes\u2026.\u201dthe cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n The second major push will be to have all of your smart phones, net-books, and new \u201ccloud appliances\u201d use only \u201cthe cloud\u201d for storage. Physical storage on each of these devices will continue to shrink until there is only enough room for the bootable operating system and cloud access driver. Most consumers will only notice that things are getting cheaper, not the reason why. Years will go by before we find out Congress and government officials had for lack of better terms Grep and Spyder tools along with complete access to all of the content on \u201cthe cloud.\u201d They would use these tools to track anyone who was initially considered a threat to the government (be that government the U.S.A. or Moammar Gadhafi\u2019s brutal dictatorship. Eventually these tools will be used to identify all thought criminals who are not part of the party elite.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"