Day 3 at Oracle Open World 2014 – Cloud: Private or Public?

One of the main subject of this year’s Oracle OpenWorld was the Cloud. In this post I will share some thoughts on this: is the Cloud a dream, a reality, fog or smoke?

Before

Before going to OOW 2014 I did not have a fixed position about Cloud. I had some questions, for instance about security like, I guess, other people. I saw several sessions and I started to write this blog two days ago to summarize my reflection. Fortunately I was in a session on Wednesday where the discussion was “Private Cloud? Public Cloud?” and after that I had to update, in the good way, this post.

Now

Now as we can choose between public, private or even mixed Cloud the sky is less …. cloudy.

I am a bit more convinced. I would use Public Cloud for the development environment as this will reduce the implementation time, flexibility for the developer. Why not also for the training as we do not have to use production data? For the QA, clone and production I would more use the Private Cloud for the time being. In both cases we will benefit from great agility, low expenses, better utilization of resources aso.

But there are still some questions:

• Although we can install the Private Cloud like the Public one, what will be the impact of the budget?
• What will be the impact on our day to day work?
• What will be our role as an integrator working more on the infrastructure layer?
• Do we have a view and can we have some valuable discussions with the people who manage our system in the Public Cloud in case we hit issues? Can a good relationship be build?
• Today we increase our skills while we are working also in Dev on the premise installation. We can hit sometimes, during the integration phase, issues that have to be solved. This of course avoid to have later the same problems in the other environments. How will this work in case we use a mixed environment, Public for Dev, Private for Prod?
• Who will do the load&stress tests in case the Public Cloud is used?
• In a validated system we have to follow strict procedures (e.g. GxP). How is this managed in the Public Cloud? Are we still compliant? Are the people managing the Public Cloud trained using the company’s procedures? The last session confirmed that in that case we have to use the Private Cloud.
• Besides the regulatory rules in the different countries, what will be the acceptance in the different countries? Will it be the same in Europe as in the USA? Do we have the same culture about this subject?
• Another question which is not related to the technology; how the future young IT people have to be positionned? Which kind of training they have to follow? Is this already in place in the universities? Are the teacher aware of those changes?

I’ve got lots of information on the technical side but I am also interested on the social and human point of view. It would be interesting to have the view(s) from a sociologist or philosopher as this new approach will certainly have an impact on our life – like the Big Data will have.

Probably I missed some information in all this flow and I don’t have all keys. But I think we are at the beginning of a revolution? evolution? or opportunity.

Let’s see what will happen in the next few years, and think about it in the meantime…