Forget 'the cloud'; 'the fog' is tech's future

I'm as big a believer in the transformational power of cloud computing as anyone you'll meet. Smart phones, which are constantly seeking and retrieving data, don't make sense without the cloud, and any business that isn't racing to push its data and software into someone else's data center is, in my view, setting itself up for disruption by a competitor who is.

But cloud advocates are fond of declaring that 100% of computing will someday reside in the cloud. And many companies are in business to sell you on that notion.

Here's the reality: Getting data into and out of the cloud is harder than most engineers, or at least their managers, often are willing to admit.

The problem is bandwidth. If you're a company simply seeking to save the cost and headache of storing data yourself, the cloud is great as long as all you need to do is transfer data back and forth via high-speed wiring.

But in the world of mass connectivityin which people need to get information on an array of mobile devicesbandwidth is pretty slow. Any business that sends data to mobile devices, be it airline reservation systems for consumers or business data for a mobile sales force, grapples with the limitations of wireless networks. Overall, according to the World Economic Forum, the U.S. ranks 35th in the world in terms of bandwidth per user.

Just as the cloud physically consists of servers harnessed together, the fog consists of all the computers that are already around us, tied together. On one level, asking our smart devices to, for example, send software updates to one another, rather than routing them through the cloud, could make the fog a direct rival to the cloud for some functions.

The bottom line is, we just have too much data. And we're just getting started. Airplanes are a great example of this. In a new Boeing Co. 747, almost every part of the plane is connected to the Internet, recording and, in some cases, sending continuous streams of data about its status. General Electric Co. has said that in a single flight, one of its jet engines generates half a terabyte of data.

Cheap sensors generate lots of "big" data, and it's surprisingly useful. So-called predictive analytics lets companies like GE know which part of a jet engine might need maintenance, even before the plane carrying it has landed.

Why else do you think Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. are talking about alternate means of Internet access, including via balloons and drones? Existing carriers aren't getting the job done. Until the U.S. gets the fast wireless and wired Internet it deserves, computing things as close to the user as possible is going to be critical to making the Internet of Things responsive enough to be usable.

The future of much enterprise computing remains in the cloud, but the really transformative computing of the future? It's going to happen right here, in the objects that surround usin the fog.

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