New technologies have always rested and stood on the shoulders of older technologies. For the wheel to work properly, we needed a smooth road. For a national telephone system to work properly, we needed a national telecommunication infrastructure linking one part of the country to another.
For new technologies to work, old technologies must be harnessed, leveraged and utilized to their maximum capacity, eventually pushing past their abilities forging new inventions.
This pattern, new relying on old to build progress is the same pattern currently taking place within the Cloud Computing space. The old technology is data center infrastructure. The new technology is the ever expanding world of mobile devices, portable hotspots and shared Wi-Fi connections all powering devices to access data on demand.
The Cloud space is, without question, growing at rapid clips. Yet, while the Cloud space continues to grow, Cloud architecture – once and still thought of as the newest of the new within non tech crowds – is started to resemble old tech used for the infrastructure of newer solutions.
A great example of this is the Internet of Things. While most non tech crowds have no idea what the Internet of Things is, tech oriented minds have been waiting for this moment to come. The Internet of Things – connected devices speaking to one another to convey real time information for utilization – would not exist without Cloud infrastructure. While the Cloud is grounded in the older tech of data centers, the Internet of Things relies on both the solid infrastructure of data centers and the scalability/flexibility of Cloud hosting services. Without both operating in tandem – helping one another to leverage the best of both technologies – the Internet of Things would not be possible.
The other great example of this pattern is Big Data. Much like the Internet of Things, Big Data is wholly reliant on data center architectures and connected mobile devices to supply a never ending instant stream of data to be picked over, discerned and analyzed. Unlike Cloud solutions, Big Data services harness even older technologies like sunken ocean sensors, airplane engine monitoring programs and older sensory equipment to collect, aggregate and connect to real time data. Once again, new utilizing old.
And yet, the old helping the new to build another solution isn’t the headline. In fact, as previously mentioned, this pattern has existed for as long as humans have used tools. No. The bigger story, the true headline behind this pattern, is what we can do with the combination of tech tool sets now available to us specifically due to newer solutions utilizing the infrastructure of older tech services.
While the uses for Cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things depend on the genius of individuals and groups, in combination the three technologies provide humanity with an instant on demand data environment designed to provide us with the most up-to-date information about the world around us so that we can make better informed decisions. These tech tool sets – Big Data, Cloud, Internet of Things – carries with it the power to fully change the way we see and interact with the world. As we utilize the tech tool sets more and more, we apply them to problems at hand hoping to unlock answers previously unseen.
The true promise of tech tools sets isn’t that they will eventually become the old helping the new. No. The true promise of our current tech tool sets are that they will allow us to understand the world around us in a more empirical, data driven perception than ever before.