What will it take to fully connect our world through the intersection of cloud and mobility - for our cars, our homes, our communities, ourselves? This is what we discussed at last week’s National Institute of Standards conference on The Intersection of Cloud and Mobility, at which we captured the
- current state of cloud and mobility and what’s on the horizon,
- challenges to privacy, security and usability, and
- implications of ubiquitous computing, where humans and computers interact in a transparent way.
Experts from government, academia and industry framed a path forward to achieve our vision for mobility powered by a boundaryless cloud ecosystem. This is one aspirational goal of the hybrid cloud-to-cloud model defined by NIST scientists Tim Grance and Peter Mell several years ago.
What I most enjoy about the NIST conferences is their unbiased macro view of what is feasible in exploiting the mobile/cloud/big data revolution. Here are some highlights.
Key Learnings From Today’s Cloud Adoption
Government as a Platform can make large data sets available in the cloud for collective innovation. But security remains the greatest inhibitor to cloud adoption. In 2013, $46 billion was spent on security and yet breaches rose 20%, with the cost per breach rising by 30%. And in 2014, 40% of IT security jobs will remain unfilled due to a lack of qualified IT professionals.
Security needs to become a core design principle. It was not core to the design of the Internet or mobile devices, but rather, was added later. We all know "how well" that approach has worked, with major data breaches occurring on a regular basis lately. It was also suggested that, in future, security technologies be designed around the data, not the infrastructure, which gets reinvented routinely.
Most surprising to me was how security courses are not even required in many leading university IT programs in the U.S! Even in top IT programs, security classes are offered only as an elective. And industry is not teaching “design for security” on the job either.
This is a major shortcoming in IT education that needs to be addressed right away.
Interoperability of clouds was a hot topic as always. It was suggested that interoperability, like security, be intrinsic to design. While market leaders seek to be the first "standard" for competitive advantage, as innovation matures, interoperability between vendors can expand shared services and code re-use for faster adoption. For example, Federated Community Clouds (Intercloud) integrate multiple cloud provider environments (public or private) for scale, but each retains some autonomy to serve the interests of a select user group.
The U.S. Federal Government faces the added challenge of having 15-year old legacy applications that would cost a fortune to re-platform for the cloud. One way to gain the IT efficiencies of cloud is to run those applications in a co-location facility with bursting into the public cloud via private networks. That buys time and savings for agencies to migrate off legacy to more contemporary cloud-based applications.
The Art Of The Possible
Cloud is the ideal hyperscale compute engine to enable mobility’s "anytime anywhere" paradigm. Developing functions on the mobile device that create new context to personalize one’s experience is the untapped potential for mobile-cloud. So the ways in which personal profiling can tailor our user experience – or increase that "big brother feeling" – are only just starting!
One compelling idea for mobile-cloud is the Vehicular Cloud vision being researched by Mario Gerla and colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). A Vehicular Cloud would provide intelligent transport by sensing the environment and combining with content and user preferences to optimize urban surveillance and vehicular traffic management. The increased compute power of mobile nodes (devices, sensors) with cloud enables vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. That could make driving safer and traffic flows more efficient. Other Internet connectivity could personalize travel advisories or navigation.
The Department of Transportation just announced a plan to require V2V in future cars, estimating it could prevent up to 80% of car accidents. Cars could even act as witnesses to accidents, by gathering visual data at the scene to be downloaded and reconstructed by law enforcement later.
In our emerging mobile-cloud world, there will be nowhere to hide!
It’s always a pleasure to attend NIST’s science and technology conferences to stay abreast of the latest and scariest innovations in our cloud, mobile, big data world. See you at the next event!
Follow @JacquelnVanacek for how cloud, mobile, social media and big data are reinventing our world.
