Archived Posts

Since I have four quiet hours on the flight back from DC to Denver, I thought I'd use this time to catch up on a few blog posts and review some of our GSA cloud A&A content.

Each year I'm fortunate enough to speak at several industry events. This week, I’ll be participating in the Digital Government hosted event "Cloud 101: A Call to Action”. The event takes place Wednesday, March 30 at the Reagan Building in DC.

As technology continues to mature, the benefits of that technology trickle down to the enterprise at large. As developments in applications technology grow, so does the need for a more flexible and variable computing structure. In today’s world, for example, the dynamics of an e-commerce site might require the computational power of sixteen quad-core servers one week, and half that the next.

When I first entered the field, thin-client was the rage. The intent was to offload the computing requirements from the desktop machines, and instead pass only entered / parsed data and screen refresh information back to the desktop. I’m dating myself here, but the functional imperative of thin-client was borne of the weak processing power of the desktops of yore. As Moore’s Law asserted itself, desktop machines became more and more robust… and the technical limitations that made thin-client de rigueur were rendered moot.

The long routes are those less travelled, less frequently. Here, the delta between “then and now” is more dramatic. On one of these rides, I might notice a new shopping center where once was a copse of trees or what was once a treacherous stretch of crumbling asphalt is now freshly-paved, inviting a more spirited ride. There is a point here – indeed, almost an axiom: “absence highlights change”. And so it is with our industry.

Think back roughly 10 years ago. Worldcom had just imploded, the Treo 600 was the hottest phone out there, and Microsoft had just launched the Xbox Live service. Each of these examples were major evolutionary steps in computing. We’re in the midst of another massive paradigm shift for computing.

A common concern heard from our customers - how they can embrace the cloud but still use familiar networking controls and topologies. Sure it’s great if you can completely re-architect an application for cloud use, but in reality this isn't possible for many enterprise and federal customers' applications and workloads.