TSC Trusted Advisors’ Blog

Smog Computing, Seeing through the fog

Every year we have a huge accident somewhere in the US because a group of morons think that they can charge through the tulle fog at 85MPH. They’re genuinely surprised to discover that not everyone is a foolish as they are. Unfortunately, this discovery is made too late and people die. Okay, that’s a pretty harsh comparison, but it’s pretty accurate when we think about what’s happening with virtualization and cloud computing.

I’ve made two presentations in the past two weeks and I’m amazed at how much people don’t know about cloud computing and how the marketing departments have once again driven the solution.

So, about smog. Smog is created when pollutants and atmospheric components combine in such a way that they create a big dirty cloud that hangs in the air like, well, a big dirty cloud. The marketing people would have you think of light, puffy, cute things when you think about cloud computing - “You’re on Cloud 9 when you use our service!”

I was amazed at the fact that the 100 or so folks that I’ve presented to in the last couple of weeks haven’t seen that. We have firewalls, IDS, IPS, AV, ASW, and a huge security industry for a reason: the Internet is just a big dirty cloud and we’re driving into it at near warp speed. Hopefully, when this crash happens the only deaths will be the careers of those that drove us there.