The Enterprise Outlook is Cloudy

During Defrag, I found myself in an interesting conversation with Jerry Michalski and Andrew McAfee regarding the future of the enterprise. I posited that eventually “the enterprise firewall will fall.” Let’s just say there wasn’t resounding agreement and not enough time to truly deep dive into the very difficult and multi-faceted topic.

Let me clarify my position: In the future, the “cloud” will emerge to an extent where to the laymen in an organization, it will be challenging if not impossible to understand where the enterprise ends (what is behind the firewall) and the cloud begins (what is beyond the firewall). This does not mean corporate data will be public for all to see, some sort of enterprise information security will remain but it WILL be much more open than it is today. Thus, whether the enterprise information and feature-set is behind the firewall or in front can become a non-issue as the technology permits. Furthermore, I just do not see how IT constituents can stop it short of blocking internet access completely.

What is interesting is those reading this will probably polarize to two camps, “wow, you are out of your mind, IT will never stand for that” OR “wow, you didn’t make much of a leap, that is obvious”. In fact, for the latter camp, I would tend to agree, it is happening already. Jerry Zawodny, of the Yahoo! Developer Network, commented that Term Extraction is the second most popular web service on their network. I’m sure all of the data submitted to the web service by users is readily available consumer information and not protected corporate data of any kind.

Enterprise users are using GMail for email (cloud). Sales people are using Salesforce.com SaaS offering for CRM and it is gaining even more traction with the emergence of AppExchange (cloud). Thousands of enterprise users have their profiles and are collaborating on Facebook (cloud). Amazon S3 is there and start-ups being leveraged by enterprise uses are using it (cloud). And sites like Swivel are offering private environments (cloud). This is a short, non-comprehensive list.

Thus, it doesn’t even take a lot of vision to make the leap that this is going to happen with even more and more frequency. And even if the earliest adoption of 2.0 type tools like Socialtext’s wiki software, Connectbeam’s enterprise bookmarking solution and Attensa’s RSS enterprise software is taking place behind the firewall, my sense is that it is still a factor driven by information security concerns, not anti-cloud sentiment.

Ultimately, information and capabilities will exist in the cloud, and most likely there will be more in the cloud than behind the firewall. My sense the nimble organizations will react to this and learn how to make most effective use of the crowd. Only the most sensitive of information will sit behind the firewall in the long term. And of course, it is paramount that the technology providers continue to assure CIOs that information security and software reliability is in their SaaS offerings.