“Return with us now to
those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering
hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”
If you remember those
words, you probably remember…timesharing computer services.
As government – and the
rest of the world – moves into a more comprehensive Cloud environment, the IT
world looks more and more like it did in the 1970’s, in the days of the
Teleprocessing Service s Program – that was “timesharing” services, when vendors
provided a great deal of the computer services for agencies on remote computer
systems.
In the Timesharing world,
customers used commercial computers (Hardware as a Service) over commercial
telecommunications lines (analogous to Internet connectivity) to perform their
mission functions (Software as a Service), generally on the agency’s own data,
which resided in the commercial data center (“Cloud”-like).
While not quite a perfect
match, the analogy is awfully close to the way we are moving today. In those
days of early “mass computing, commercial telephone lines were the
communications backbone, evolving into dedicated telecomm lines from customer
(client) to service provider (“server”).
There are lessons to be
learned from those days. The same issues confronting us today were around then.
There was a different spin on them, but it would certainly be worth a look to
the past to see where there are lessons to be learned:
Security
Contracting
Service levels
Competition
Collaboration
Data transparency
Do you have any recollections
that are relevant to our new Cloud World?
