IDC: Cloud really WILL save melting economy, just like the EU said Only regulatory intervention by the EU will give punters the necessary comfort to dive into the cloud. Or so says beancounter IDC, in a study commissioned by the, er, EC, just weeks after the EC itself said it plans to cobble together industry standards across its 27 member states. The analyst "modelled" different scenarios …
Like so much marketing jargon, it ends up meaning "just what I choose it to mean". If I colocate my web servers in a Tier 1 data centre, that's the 'cloud'. If I use a web-based application like Salesforce.com, that's the 'cloud' too. If I host some of my stuff on EC2, that's the 'cloud' as well. And if I move all my servers to Google, give everyone an iPad and tell them they're going to be working from home, that's definitely the 'cloud'.
The point is that each of these activities has an entirely different cost-benefit model, sets of security and other business implications, etc. Of course, if you lump them all together you can point to a good deal of economic activity. But whether it's useful to do so is another question entirely.
So if I have an IT department of, say, a dozen people and I can lay most of them off by putting everything on "the cloud" (marketing bullshit for networks and virtualisation, both of which have been around for decades) run by some guy in India, exactly how does this create jobs in "the region"?
And more to the point, who pays for the people to make up this shit? They should put Brussels on "the cloud". Most of the shite they come up with could be produced by a few lines of code anyway. Most of the results are "state the fucking obvious" or "produce some bullshit which doesn't take reality into account". This one's the latter.
"Will spend €250bn on cloud computing in 2020, creating some 3.8 million local jobs in the region"
Of course the 250 beeelion won't come from nowhere. They will not be spent on something else like, err.... local machine capacity or employees. Maybe?
That's of course assuming that serious mishaps on the road to Camelot won't happen. Like a financial meltdown, redux?
That's of course assuming that "250 beeelion EU" will buy you anything more than new winter tires for your Peugeot and a coffee in 2020. The way Weimar EU is going, odds are not good.
That's of course assuming that the next "cakewalk" (in which the EU will somehow feel obliged to participate) won't happen pretty soon and either result in a convulsive shock to the energy supply or even in a hopefully somewhat limited nuclear exchange of some sort (Fighting Israel's dirty wars, Georgia coming NATO, hello?!).
"....creating some 3.8 million local jobs in the region...." I saw one of these tincan-shaking EU studies a few years back to do with NAS and how installing such devices was going to creating X million jobs. The only problem was when you looked into the figures they had said it would take eight people to administer the paperwork and do the actual installation and configuration for each NAS unit, neatly ignoring that in many cases those eight people would be the same VAR or vendor people.
I wandered unemployed thanks to the Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodils (i.e. consultants);
Along the Lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze,
and billing by the hour!
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