I’m Shlomo Swidler, founder and CEO of Orchestratus. I have four wonderful children, a son age 15 and three daughters ages 10, 8, and 3. Six years ago, when I began consulting for large and small companies helping them achieve meaningful results from adopting cloud computing, my second daughter Hadar was two years old. Today she is eight years old, and I’d like to share a story with you that happened this past weekend.Hadar was playing a game with her sisters where they were all robots of one type or another, and she decided she was – this is New York, I can say this – a farting robot. In her robot voice she would say, “I am a farting robot. I will catch you and fart on you if you don’t obey my orders.” And she would chase her sisters around, pretending to do exactly that. I was watching this game from the next room, and I asked Hadar, “Sweetheart, can robots really fart?” Without missing a beat she answered in her robot voice, “I use my robot imagination.”The point of this true story is, we attribute to technology things that it can’t really do.I was drawn into the world of cloud computing seven years ago from the technology angle, as a developer creating massively scalable systems. But, as I began to help larger organizations utilize cloud, I discovered that the technology alone can’t deliver the purported agility, speed, flexibility, and unicorns that these organizations need.
Your use of computing is governed by technological requirements – what is technologically feasible. Economic factors also bound the use of computing – demand, supply, cost, and ROI. Organizational requirements influence the use of computing heavily – the extent of sharing and cooperation between different business areas is one good example. And, even when we find the perfect solution for technical economic, and organizational requirements, security requirements further influence – usually restrict – the field of play.The fact that technological, economic, organizational, and security requirements constrain the use of computing is not new. What is relatively new is the ever-changing nature of these requirements, and the ability to create systems and processes that dynamically adjust to these changes. Cloud computing means creating computing systems that adjust to changes.