Cloud Architectures and Cultural Memory - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 2

couple of days. 1 I am going to give you several perspectives at a high level but I am
hopeful that you will see parts of this echoing through the discussions as the
conference proceeds.
Let me get on to my main two themes here. First I want to spend a little time
clarifying the various ideas covered by “clouds.”

2 Clouds and Cloud Services: Working Definitions and

Examples

Clouds, of course, have been all the rage in the information technology and even the
popular press, among the consultants and technology pundits, and everywhere else for
about three, four years now. It's getting to the point where you would be wise to
cross-examine anyone who makes reference to “the cloud” fairly carefully because it
means totally different things to different people. It has some fairly precise, technical
meanings although they range quite broadly: you see storage clouds , which are in
fairly widespread deployment now, although even there I think the hype about them
perhaps outruns the reality. You see compute (often used as compute on demand)
clouds ; those are also relatively commonplace, although perhaps more concentrated in
certain niche markets than one might think. One of the things that's wonderful about
the world of compute clouds, for example, is that you don't have to spend a lot of
money up front. So if you are planning to do an Internet startup, and you do not
happen to have the money to make capital investments in huge amounts of server
capacity for the great success that you are expecting as soon as your service launches,
you can use a cloud-based on demand computing service to make capacity planning
and provisioning someone else's problem; you will pay a premium for this, but for the
many start-up entrepreneurs there is real value here, and we have seen this used
extensively by the last generation of such start-ups.
We also are seeing more recently the notion of service or applications clouds as
increasingly ubiquitous environments for doing work, for collaborating or socializing;
sometimes we talk about this using terms like Software as a Service . This started
probably most heavily in the consumer market place where you think of various
image sharing services - Tumblr, Flickr, etc. - out there in the cloud. You think of
something like Facebook (or Google+) or Twitter as this cloud-based service and yet,
as you look at these different services, they increasingly have tendrils everywhere,
some of which are visible: you know you will buy something someplace and it will
immediately offer you a button to post down on Facebook. In other cases the tendrils
and connections are more subterranean, with various brokerage and tracking services
gathering up, handing off, or collecting cookies and other tracking implements

1 Note: This is a moderately edited transcript of a keynote address given at the 4 th International
Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World (IMCW), Limerick, Republic of
Ireland on September 4, 2013; it clarifies a few additional points, but retains the character of a
talk rather than a formal paper. My thanks to Diane Goldenberg-Hart for her help in assembling
this, and to Michael Buckland and Joan Lippincott for some very helpful suggestions.