Bonfires, Dry Stone Walls, Clouds, Inches & Death Computing

Colin Beveridge spoke at the 20/20 Vision event organised by Sandford Technology/Virtronix on Fighting the Trillion Dollar Bonfire (effective information systems for the 21st Century). His conclusion seemed to be that system integration is the way forwards. I have to agree. Most IS systems seems like good old Yorkshire stone walls - they require immense intricacy to put them together and great skill to build, then they fall down after a while because there's nothing but air and friction holding them together. What we need is some 'cement' to hold the functional bricks together and facilitate process, workflow, data sharing and increased productivity. Yorkshire Forward seem to have woken up to the fact that each 'brick in the wall' they fund is replicating data and not sharing it effectively with each other. They are introducing a CRM that all agencies can tap into, leverage and generally use. Great idea! I have been saying this for three year's and every other agency seemed to wave the data protection act at me as to why we can't share information more!!!

The death of the corporate datacentre seemed to also be on the vendor agenda with all our data being entrusted to third parties (like this blog and my emails). Ian Weatherhog and Mike Briercliffe waxed lyrically about how the PC was the root of all evil when it came to data security (he also spoke at our recent TechTalk event). I can remember far enough back when I accessed the old cloud i.e. our corporate IT server from a remote PC and the data could be viewed, but not manipulated. We used to say all this valuable data was "an inch from the desktop" and spent ten years going that final inch and start turning data into information, albeit with security and integrity compromised. Now we seem to be poised to unify the competing factions with the eventual promise of network computing and Larry Ellison's vision of thin clients that all they do is the final rendering.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before we all have enough certainty that "till death us do part" our data is safe and backed up in the cloud and not deleted when our credit card expires. Now that's what I call security.