By Charles H. Silver
Sept. 15, 2011
With more than 37 percent of U.S. companies running a significant portion of business applications in the Cloud (Advanced Micro Devices survey, May 2011), clearly the adoption of Cloud computing will soon become ubiquitous. This marked increase in the use of the Internet for accessing computing resources will necessitate an evolution in the Cloud computing network.
For one thing, Cloud computing will move from operating on the relatively simple networks of today, to vastly more-complex networks needed to integrate applications and data distributed across the Internet.
Beyond this, there will be a need to analyze vast amounts of data – enterprise data, market data and social media data – most of which is corporate information that is not contained in a pre-defined database, i.e., is “unstructured.” Integrating all this data will necessitate replacing archaic, 40-year-old data-management systems with more advanced programs capable of managing data of all kinds – structured or unstructured – distributed anywhere across heterogeneous global networks.
Indeed, in a recent survey, 62 percent of respondents said it is inevitable that unstructured information will exceed the volume of traditional relational data within the next decade. (Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today Inc.) Further, 35 percent say unstructured information has already surpassed or will surpass traditional relational data as soon as over the next 36 months.
Spreading across an increasingly diverse array of data centers, computing will inevitably become much more distributed than it currently is, bringing with it new data-management, architectural and performance challenges.