Architects Anonymous

If you have been paying attention to the Google, Microsoft rivalry you might have figured out that these two titans have something up their sleeve. On one hand it is search. Evident of this is the ongoing, highly publicized, Bing search engine which promises to be a decision-based search engine.

Cloud Computing
On the other hand of this rivalry is cloud computing, a relatively new computing phenomenon which has been defined by some computer scientist as,

a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. [As a result] users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them. Source: Wikipedia

The notion of cloud-computing has been around since the dot-com era. Several brilliant computers geeks have attempted to propel us to this new wave of computing. Many of them have been unsuccessful. Of these is Marc Andreessen, once a poster-boy of geekiness founded what would become Netscape, sold it to AOL and then in 2002 started a cloud computing venture. The latter was highly unsuccessful, perhaps because according to Andreessen, “the world wasn’t ready for cloud computing”.

The race to domination in this relatively new system has been heated for a while and now Microsoft and Google are appearing to be catching up rather quickly.

Enter Salesforce.com and NetSuite.com
Over the past three years, there have been a couple of other successful cloud-computing ventures, two of which are Saleforce.com and NetSuite.com. These companies function primarily by offering their clients with software – over the internet. They have been effective in successfully enabling companies to access necessary programs over the web, in most cases eliminating the need to an in-house IT-Tech.

So what does this mean for us engineers?
From the fast pace of how things are moving in this industry, it is becoming obvious that we can no longer ignore is the fact that cloud-computing is the future. A time is coming when our computers and laptops will merely be stand-alone, software-less devices, which will only serve as connections to the internet.

So, what does it mean to us engineers and our beloved AutoCAD and Microstation applications? If we are to fully embrace this new wave of computing, then we will have to brace ourselves and accept that cloud computing is an unavoidable emerging computing technology which will use the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Once we have accepted this basic fact, then we can address the other issues that we are likely to face as engineers.

Security
Clearly, cloud computing provides a myriad of issues that engineers will have to consider as they embrace this new wave of computing. Paramount of these is security. How do we assure our government clients that their projects will be safe in the “clouds”?  How do we make sure that those handling the “clouds” will meet our required security needs?

Access
How do we handle the likely event of a cloud-server-crash – at conveniently the day of submission to the client?

Control
With cloud computing you give control of your data to a third party.

Loss of data

Server crashes? Hackers?

Advantages

While the mentioned problematic issues are certainly worth mentioning, we ought not to ignore the obvious advantages of this system,

Better interoperability between consultants, contractors and sub-consultants Shifted responsibility for Data and Programs Global access Software updates applying to all users automatically and simultaneously Reduced overhead – through elimination of IT-techs, servers and storage devices It will no longer be possible for a user to run an “old” version of the software
by not upgrading

So, are you ready?