Quest for the Cloud

This is the second of a two part series. You can read the first part HERE.

A few days ago I wrote about Web 2.0’s “Reverse Network Effect” due to the concentration of folks at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The lack of wireless access can be truly crippling as I experienced first-hand.

Before Boston, I had just finished a two week camping/hiking/driving vacation to Alaska. The rugged state is home to the tallest mountain on the continent, the largest oilfield in North America, 24 hours of daylight (in the summer), and about 600,000 people. To give a sense of scale, Anchorage has 250,000 people with the next most populous city of Fairbanks with only 30,000 souls.

With cellular networks typically concentrating around large population centers, I didn’t expect my Blackberry to help me much for voice calls or email - and I was right. I think it has been almost a decade since I had to use a calling card at a payphone, but there I used one every day. Don’t have your car breakdown on the infamous Dalton Highway - if it does right in the middle, you only have to walk at most 207 miles in either direction to get a signal.

However Alaska is the “land of the big ass RVs”. RVs that made buses look like vans in comparison were towing Hummers, Ford Expeditions, and trailers. There I was in an old Honda Civic and a tent (RV’ing is NOT camping no matter what anybody says). The shadows of these vehicles had more square footage than my first apartment in University. An RV stall at one of these parks actually has more facilities than the house I live in now:

• Water (potable and not)
• Sewer (and dump station)
• 15, 30, and 50 amp electricity drops
• Cable TV connection (just run the cable to your TV’s plasma)
• Satellite (complete with dish pointed at your favorite provider - just add receiver)

Oh yeah, and the fastest WiFi this side of the Yukon.

Before you think I’m talking about an isolated case, let me introduce to the dusty little town called Chicken, Alaska (Permanent population 13). BTW - you want to look up why the town is named that - it’s not what you think. From the Alaska highway, it is a 2 hour dirt road through the mountains, and the Canadian border is another 1.5 hours further on.

The town has a gas station with a store, 2 RV parks, a restaurant, a coffee shop, and absolutely no cellular coverage for hundreds of miles (same deal for flush toilets apparently). I couldn’t find a payphone, but the coffee shop had a large sign outside advertising “Free WiFi”.

From here, I could access any Web 2.0 applications without any problems - not bad for a place without cellular coverage, payphones, or flush toilets. What I could not do is bring myself to have my picture taken with the town’s “welcome sign”:

As more people jump on to social networking sites, the “Reverse Network Effect” will grow. Inaccessibility of a reliable Internet connection can be a real problem for companies that have embraced Web 2.0 and use sites like SalesForce.com, Google Apps, and CrystalReports.com. For some businesses, there is real monetary consequence if a sales order or critical piece of information is not available.

The knee-jerk reaction for many companies is “use offline only applications like Word, PowerPoint, rich-client CRM tools”, but this is very short sighted. Like any new technology, organizations need to weigh the pros and cons, and most importantly develop mitigation plans for the inevitable gaps between reality and utopia.

As Web 2.0 technologies move from “cool” to “nice to have” to “mission critical”, the industry will have to come up with a scalable answer - it is not only server availability from our Cloud vendor, but also the ability for your employees to actually talk to that server.

Have an answer to the problem or have comments?  Write me at ashish (at) questforthecloud.com.