Google is making an effort which is their biggest potential game changer since Gmail. Fiber as a Service (FaaS) will slowly make a change to the ISP marketplace since Google can afford to compete on it’s own terms.
Category: Google
Did you hear about the university professor signed up for a cloud service and unknowingly left his department on the hook for two years of service beyond his grant….or the university who had more than 500,000 student records (social security, addresses and grades) hacked? Cloud computing poses special demands upon Universities who can no longer employ the same procurement process used to acquire computers and software since the 1980s.
Are you aware that today many Universities (and K12 School districts) use a popular email marketing program that sells contact information of students to vertical marketing firms who in turn re-sell them to other marketing and product companies?
Today’s aggressive marketplace and the business of cloud services has radically changed the procurement process. Many of us have a fiduciary duty to protect data of our students, research and institutions. Regardless of how students freely give away their data on Facebook, our institution will still be held responsible to protect all of our institution’s data.
My views on the impact of Cloud Computing in Higher Education have been slowly evolving. This past May I was given an incredible opportunity to further my learning by participating in an Engineering & Technology Short Course with the UCLA Extension.
Remember those “must-take classes” in college? UCLA’s Contracting for Cloud Computing Services is one on my list of those opportunities you cannot afford to ignore. My advice: Find your way to UCLA.
Again, I hope this can help as many people as possible understand the lessons taught in class. Due to the nature of the beast they are in no specific order. They are all top level concerns:
BACKGROUND
For over a generation traditional desktop PC vendors focused on features and price. Since the late 1980s schools established trust in vendor’s products to conduct business, educate students and store student data. From floppy disks to magnetic tape all data was stored locally on campus.
Today’s globalized internet marketplace is radically different when compared to the modem era of computing. The cloud computing model represents a number of fundamental shifts including Software as a Service(SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) are well established.
And although it’s a bit ahead on the radar we should not overlook the quickly emerging SuperComputer as a Service. While there is no standard acronym, there are established vendors like SGI’s Cyclone, Amazon’s Cluster Compute, IBM’s Watson, and with forthcoming merge between PiCloud and D-Wave‘s quantum computing….more options for High Performance Computing will be available to many smaller, lean and aggressive institutions.
These new services are directly tied to the “consumerization” of technology: advanced technologies at affordable price points. As a result the new focus is around access. The shift to mobile computing via netbooks, smartphones and tablets is well underway, yet many school’s do not have a sufficient wireless infrastructure. Students, faculty and administrators are today carrying a laptop, smartphone and probably an iPad. Schools are struggling to to handle bandwidth demands of so many devices in concentrated areas around campus, from the Student Union to the ResHalls.
IMHO the tipping point with Cloud computing and digital devices is the convenience of access. Today many diverse schools have a campus community that simply demands anytime/anywhere access to data. And it’s no longer just email and web. Its BIG data from data base research to the delivery of HD media. For better (or for worse) society has become trained to demand mobile solutions that easily integrate into the app economy and their mobile lifestyles.
I simply burst out laughing reading the Detroit News‘ article regarding Madonna’s sharply falling record sales. Her latest release MDNA debuted at #1 last week after selling 359,000 copies according to Nielsen SoundScan. Yet as the article indicated: Madonna set to make the wrong kind of chart history. Clearly author Adam Graham (@grahamorama) has no idea how torrents have simply crushed the music industry. If he does understand — it was not mentioned in his article.
Riddle me this: How does Nielsen, Billboard or any other entertainment resource accurately reflect the impact of torrents on sales? Ah….they can’t. The fact that Nielsen/Billboard still lists “traditional chart history” tells me another analog business is choking to death on the globalized internet.
I have come to accept that illegal downloads are no different than drugs, ebooks, guns or music. All are in heavy demand. The only difference: ebooks and music use the internet. Supply and demand. Nothing more.
Its been a long standing issue for me to see mainstream media really show how inept they are when it relates to the globalization of the internet. So what exactly did Adam Graham miss?
If you really want to understand the way the world works…
If you listen to all those social media wanna-bees who jumped on the Google+ bandwagon as the latest and greatest social media tool. Seems as soon as they received their beta invite the avalanche began.
Proving that ‘tigers eat their young’ those same pundits are already calling Google+….the next GoogleWave.
Wave? Oh, how quickly did you forget about Google’s last B-L-U-N-D-E-R in social media? Feels like yesterday Google was so slowly handing out Wave invites that it actually killed user adoption by the time they got around to “launching” the product.
Wave was so over-hyped by those same pundits who were also on twitter begging for a Wave invite. I recall them wishing they could be part of the Wave hype….until the exact moment they logged into Wave they found out how complex the UI was presented. Boy did Google deserve one hard shot right to the groin for that social train wreck.
So those who consider themselves social media leaders (or innovators) are actually voicing their displeasure with Google+ after its been public for just 30 days? Oh the irony. I cannot help but relish that quote from earlier this year that puts all those social media so called leaders or innovators into context:
“99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns”
-Gary Vayerchuk interview
Research and Education network organizations are beginning to successfully integrated new communities into their membership from the beginning, but funding from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s BTOP (Broadband Technology Opportunities Program) has created opportunities to build non-traditional communities from public sectors such as public safety, state government and healthcare.
Today’s panel session included representatives from network organizations and their new community partner discussing their experience and providing their perspective on the opportunities, challenges and lessons learned when building new communities.
David Reese CTO from CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California) stated they have provided iPads to everyone with all mapping of fiber routes is now digital (Google Earth) and paper maps are simply being ignored.