It may sound very strange, I mean, how can Joni Mitchell, the Canadian musician, song writer and painter remotely relate to Cloud Computing ? Yes, it’s that strange.
I am not exactly a big fan of Joni Mitchell, but I do love her song “Both Sides Now” a lot. Interestingly, this song is the last one in side B of the album “Clouds” (what a coincidence), released in May 1st, 1969. Yes, it’s almost 45 years ago but the other day when I was preparing a conference keynote about cloud computing, I started iTunes and the first song it played was “Both Sides Now”. Then I found out the relationship …
Let’s check out the lyrics of that beautiful song:
Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way
As you can see, these four lines kinda described the many shapes of Cloud and Cloud Computing – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid and Community Cloud. Then the next four lines:
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
That basically apply to all traditional IT teams, Cloud Computing is now impacting their everyday works. Internal users now can bypass IT team to subscribe to various cloud based services, development team can now set up development environments in the cloud in minutes without purchasing any new servers, and one system administrator can manage dozens of servers in the virtualised environment with ease, in effect only small engineering team is needed.
Lastly, the third paragraph:
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all
Yes, clouds are all just illusions, if one takes Cloud Computing seriously – perform proper risk assessment (check out CSA Cloud Control Matrix), evaluate cloud solutions and cloud services providers systematically. Most important of all, even you host your applications in the cloud, you’re not transferred the security risk to the cloud. Instead, you are still responsible for the security of your IT systems.
Cloud Computing is real, it is not an illusion. [Both sides now – Video]
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 