These “Clouds” Are Real….

As part of our work with MissionLink, the technology company CEO forum that we co-founded in 2010, last week we were fortunate to host the CEOs of Cloudera and Digital Reasoning for an engaging discussion on the opportunities offered by today’s cloud technology solutions.  The “cloud” terminology has taken on a life of its own in recent years, often characterized as a marketing tool used to excite customers about technology and concepts that have existed for decades (grid or distributed computing, anyone?).  The reality is that today we have access to enormous amounts of data generated from countless different sources and a critical need to be able to analyze, summarize and distribute this information in near real-time.  Legacy networks and systems are simply insufficient.  Google and Facebook have led the “cloud” charge in the public domain, showing that you can employ an efficient and effective infrastructure for the collection and analysis of a significant amount of data.  The U.S. Federal government is in a position to charge down the same path but must leverage the new “cloud” concepts, tools and technologies in conjunction with legacy systems.  As witnessed by the collaborative work of Cloudera and Digital Reasoning, Big Data doesn’t have to be a roadblock to success if government customers are willing to think creatively and drive a technology infrastructure with the mission in mind.  Whether we call it “cloud” or “Infrastructure as a Service” the technology exists to optimize the computing framework and the analytics craved by users.