Prior to jumping on the popularity of "cloud-based computing," higher education institutions might want to first understand the truth in technology, according to IT consultant Charlie Moran, an industry veteran.
In a recent blog post, "Some Clouds aren't Clouds...but a truth is a truth," Moran said. He added that cloud-based technology has become muddled thanks to marketing campaigns that have taken a pretty simple technical concept and twisted it.
"After working in technology and higher education for the past 40-plus years, I’ve gotten pretty jaded about the ability of marketing people to take pretty straight forward technical concepts and twist them to mean something entirely different," Moran wrote. "There is only one real truth in technology: marketing campaigns often lie. Period. "That’s a strong word, but it fits. For example, saying a vendor has a ‘cloud solution’ is a meaningless statement."
Moran compares today's technology to what outsourcing was in the 1980s and 1990s, as far as marketing hype.
"What happened to outsourcing?" he wrote. "Many organizations moved their workload there, but in the light of day, the benefits rarely materialized, and the costs always far exceeded estimates."
Moran suggests several tips for helping to decipher "cloud solutions" a vendor might be trying to sell. They include knowing the difference between hosting and cloud, such as specific physical servers (which is actually hosting) and if your data can dynamically move to other servers when one server fails.
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