Cloud based information banks will deliver interest

Cloud computing is much talked about. By taking advantage of the convergence of affordable and ubiquitous broadband, mass storage, and mobile computing, cloud computing gives CIOs a better way to provision, deploy, and support business services. When implemented properly, cloud computing makes a large number of information services more secure, less expensive, and easier to operate. It simplifies business processes, development releases, and the software lifecycle, and makes it easier to amortize operational costs across multiple organisations.

So far cloud computing has been about service consolidation, not service technology. Amongst the cloud services available, it's challenging to name any innovations. The same was true of personal computers previously the release of VisCalc. In the end, new platforms nearly inevitably begin to enable new applications, and that's where to look for the straightway big thing.

The history of computing

Throughout the history of computing, technology has been partially predictable; by examining the newest capabilities, one is likely to find areas most ripe for research. So what does cloud computing do that's as a matter of fact new, in other words than just more efficient?

Cloud computing provides centralised storage, support, and deployment for a business' information. Such centralised, archival-quality storage is after all quite rare; even mighty IBM, for instance, distributes the email for its 400,000 workers onto hundreds of servers spread around the globe, making it near impossible to perform comprehensive operations on its archives in the aggregate. Nevertheless what might you do if you had all your data in one place, professionally administered and with computing resources to spare?

An integrated cloud-based archive can begin to offer similar services with business data. Information banking is to traditional archiving as modern banking is to medieval treasury vaults. Not only is your information kept securely, nevertheless it is analysed in a variety of ways for your benefit, providing "interest" in the form of business intelligence and other services. Information before locked up in static archives is increasingly retargeted to your organisation when and how it is most useful.

There are three approaches by which information banks can unlock the hidden value of archives: deeper business intelligence, open API's for archive access, and proactive information exploitation:

1. Business intelligence functions of various kinds can be supercharged by putting them atop an information bank. For the first time, a business's entire data can be made available in the aggregate for sophisticated analysis. This will lead to deeper insights, data visualisation, and reporting – none of which are new, nevertheless all of which are evolutionarily better with the availability of comprehensive archives.

An illustrative example is the analysis of social networks. With a complete archive of internal corporate communications, we can automatically build highly accurate and detailed visualisations of the interconnections between employees. Innovation suggests that this will yield highly actionable results; for instance, most organisations tend to have employees who are "key connectors", providing rare links between different parts of the organisation. Unfortunately, such employees often get poor performance reviews, or are even fired, because the time they spend linking the company at the same time translates into fewer deliverables. An information banking platform will make it possible, for the first time, for managers to consider an employee's communication activities in performance reviews.

2. The power of a single, integrated repository for all of an organisation's information is unlikely to be fully exploited by a single entity, even the bank itself. To reach its full potential, such information needs to be accessible to third party developers. In doing so, a key part of the value proposition of an information bank is an API for exploiting it, leading intrinsically to the notion of an "app store" for business archives.

Today, efficiency is a basic tenet of business survival. The boardroom IT conversation is no longer restricted to cutting costs-it's about investing in innovation to efficiently drive business and organisational success.

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The ability to handle large volumes of data

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