You’d have to be comatose not to notice the massive increase
and proliferation of data devices. Those
of you who know me know I am a huge fan of the Glastonbury Festival. Even at Glastonbury this year you could see
crowds of people drudging through the mud glued to the screen of their smart-phone. EE cleverly deployed 4G WiFi cows painted in
their branding to connect up 250,000 festival goes and workers. It didn’t work. I could see telecom masts on each hillside, we
had 4G WiFi cows and yet I still couldn’t effectively get online.
This was of course due to the insatiable demand of the
consumer for more data, more devices – “we need more power Scotty”. Well, the
shift has moved from processing power to pure volume of data. From the device to the data-centre of course. The other power needed was of the 5 volt DC
type and EE had another cleaver idea – a swap out charging cell for your
phone. Neat idea but AGAIN – hugely oversubscribed
and they couldn’t recharge them fast enough.
So, what I observed was a huge number of avid music fans in
a very muddy field all struggling with their addiction… no, not that, their
addiction to data. This is a huge change
in just a few years. We are addicted to
our data-fix and yet there is something really strange. We don’t have a clue and don’t really seem to
care where our data actually is. We just
push it out in to the cloud and expect it to be there and safe for when we
require it.
It’s a small wonder the heavens opened twice over the
weekend with an electrical storm which stopped the festival for 40 minutes. I think it was all the data and the cloud just
couldn’t cope and this caused the storm.
It simply has to let go of some of that energy.
But seriously; who is keeping track? Why don’t we care? How
can it be managed if we don’t really know or care where our data is held? We seem to go through a huge change sometimes
called growth, then realise we didn’t consider the consequences and then catch
up trying to put things right after the event.
It’s a massive technology change and social change and yet we take the
security and even location of data for granted.
