Right now there’s a lot of noise around Big Data. I mean you can hear the thunderclap of blog posts and industry analysis resonating all over the place. That it will become the driver for cloud maturity for one.
But in the real world, right here right now, Cloud just is still a wispy nebulous concept for a lot of businesses, often misunderstood and not the panacea for IT integration a lot had hoped for. Take the current BPM scene. Much has been made of vendor promise of process execution in the cloud but the reality is that customers are still wary. What’s more, integration is still a massive hurdle to overcome. It’s hard enough on-premise at times so trying to plug in legacy via cloud is even worse. Development in the Cloud is fine and an easy way to get up and running with speed but as soon as data creeps into the picture the storm gathers and it pisses down on the project and everyone moves back in-house for lack of umbrellas.
So what does this mean for Big Data in the Cloud ? An interesting post on Successful Workplace suggests it’s still in it’s training pants but not only that, we’re only just processing a tiny fraction of what data could possibly make up BIG data. For businesses constrained by regulatory shackles there is a lot of governance and red tape to overcome, a lot of security to put in place, and a lot of consumer confidence to gather before it even considers playing with data in this manner, let alone store, manipulate and correlate from Cloud based systems.
While the maturity of Cloud is still in question for the enterprise at large, with a rampant baby sibling like Big Data stomping into the nursery as well it could prove too much to handle at the same time for the parent business.
Many analysts propose the need for ‘Cloud Brokers’ so does this preclude the need for ‘Information Brokers’ too for Big Data ?
And does the industry at large really need another layer of middlemen ?
Or in this analogy, do we really need babysitters for these two children ?
Footnote: I took the lightning shots on my iPhone !
