tymshft

The pendulum is shifting away from the cloud. Told you so.

For years, I have been espousing a pendulum theory. Briefly, it states that we alternate between a “benevolent” model and a “rugged individualist” model. In the latter, computers (and things that are like computers, such as refrigerators) stand alone and do not depend upon anything else, but if they fail, they fail. In the benevolent model, an entity such as a time-sharing company or a cloud provider runs the show; you aren’t totally dependent upon yourself any more, but you are somewhat dependent upon this other entity.

Over the last few years, with all of the cloud hullabaloo, we have clearly been on the “benevolent” side of the pendulum. We don’t have to worry about our email, our Adobe files, or our Siri instructions – but if our email provider, Adobe, or Apple go down, we’re in trouble.

But, as any fool could predict (which is why I predicted it), we’re starting to see a retreat from the cloud. It even has a super-cool name: the “fog.”

The problem of how to get things done when we’re dependent on the cloud is becoming all the more acute as more and more objects become “smart,” or able to sense their environments, connect to the Internet, and even receive commands remotely. Everything from jet engines to refrigerators is being pushed onto wireless networks and joining the “Internet of Things.”

Luckily there’s an obvious solution: Stop focusing on the cloud, and start figuring out how to store and process the torrent of data being generated by the Internet of Things (also known as the industrial Internet) on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.

And so all of the data, and all of the computing power, is starting to move away from the cloud and is moving out toward the edge devices.

Or at least until the pendulum swings back the other way.