By Steve Harriman
Today is a good day. I just learned that I am officially cool. Well, not exactly… but I’m definitely cool by association. What’s more, I’m cool in the coolest technology space there is right now … drum roll please … the CLOUD. Yeah baby.
Yes, according a recent article in the vaunted CRN publication, CA|NetQoS is one of the coolest cloud infrastructure vendors. And for an old tech marketing guy like me, that’s as close to cool as I’ll ever get. I know this because I have a 14 year old daughter.
But, if you haven’t already figured this out, I’ll let you in on a secret. Infrastructure and infrastructure management really aren’t cool. Yes, virtualization and the cloud add new layers of management complexity (some pretty hard stuff, actually), but at the end of the day, the infrastructure just has to work. The applications that run our businesses and our lives depend on it. Heck, I don’t want my bi-weekly paycheck to depend on cool technology; I want that application running on rock-solid, totally uncool technology. If it’s in a private, public or hybrid cloud, fine. But let me feel warm and fuzzy by telling me that the IT guys responsible for the app have complete visibility into it, that they know my personal data is secure (wherever it resides), that it is backed up (someplace), that if the app fails they know where the problem is and how to resolve it, even if it’s in the cloud, and so on.
So, I think my mission, and the mission of management vendors like CA, is to get everyone’s heads out of the cloud and back down to earth. Sure, cloud computing is an important and disruptive force in our industry and we’re all over it. But let’s not get carried away with the hype. The sooner we do, the sooner cloud computing will become business as usual. Totally uncool.
My daughter wasn’t buying it anyway.
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