The Last Mile Into the Clouds

Saying that one’s head is in the clouds suggests that he or she is isolated and detached from the realities on the ground below them.  I suppose it could be interpreted as taking a high altitude view of something, but that wasn’t the impression I got when my teachers (and later, bosses) encouraged me to come back down to Earth. In that context, the clouds represent unrealistic ideas and expectations rather than high ideals and a visionary point of view.

In tech parlance, the cloud refers to non-centralized, Internet-based computing.  In the cloud computing model, users access IT hardware, software and information resources remotely and on-demand through the Internet. The term appears to have come from the all too familiar PowerPoint illustration of PCs, notebooks and handhelds connected with little lines to a large amorphous central shape containing some desired resource.

In most situations and expressions, the clouds represent a distraction or an obstacle, but the IT industry is betting the entire farm on the cloud.  The cloud promises to free users from having to own, support, power and house the IT resources they need to do their jobs.  The distributed nature of the cloud makes it (theoretically) invulnerable to the destruction or loss of any single data set, network connection or piece of hardware.

From an enterprise perspective, there is nothing inherently wrong with the cloud computing model or diagram.  For most organizations, network uptime and bandwidth are in unlimited supply so there is little reason to keep IT resources onsite.  From an individual end user’s perspective however, the cloud may not be quite the blessing that many CIOs believe it is.  In an office, users may be unaware that the resources they are using at their desks aren’t actually on their desktop computers, or even in the building.  But things change for corporate and personal IT consumers once they leave the robust, hard-wired Internet connection of the office.

In the cloud computing diagram, solid lines connect the cloud in the center to the terminals or end users surrounding it. Out in the real world however, a fast, stable and secure broadband connection isn’t as robust or ubiquitous as the diagram suggests.  Broadband still isn’t available to many homes and wireless Internet connectivity in most places is slow and spotty at best. Every mobile device, from large laptops to small smart phones, is occasionally offline.  Even enterprise broadband is subject to local hardware failures and occasional last mile service disruptions.  (For example, earlier this week a single phase brown out at CompTIA’s DC office took down the local router and sent everyone to work from home for the day).

Until recently, consumers and professionals alike expected and prepared for the intermittent loss of connectivity.  The night before a long flight, I used to configure Internet Explorer to cache all my favorite websites three pages deep so I could surf merrily at 30,000 feet without a live Internet connection.  Most of us still access email and podcasts this way with our devices transparently downloading the latest content whenever a connection becomes available.

I like to call this the “cache and carry” model and I apply it to most of my digital activities.  Professionally, I make sure I have enough content stored on my machine to keep myself busy for at least a day or two in case I’m ever offline for an extended period.  Personally, I store several days worth of music, blog posts, podcasts and videos across various household and handheld devices for the same reason.  I keep local copies of all the photos and videos I’ve uploaded, and I have kept a local copy of every word I have written in the last decade.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m no happier about being offline than the next guy.  I just like to be prepared in case a temporary last mile failure or a major global catastrophe disrupts my Internet connection (not that my personal entertainment would matter much in the latter case).

I like to think of the cloud like the island in the television series LOST.  It is a wonderful place but it isn’t always accessible and sometimes, it simply disappears.  The cloud, like the island in LOST, would definitely be a nice place to visit but not everyone would (or should) want to live there. So as our industry migrates to the cloud I hope we’ll all remember that access to our stuff is only as reliable as the last mile of our Internet connection.  I for one will be keeping one foot firmly on the ground.  Ouch!