Architect's Mind

Here is the link to an impressive talk about what topics are architects' interested in. The post beautifully prioritizes various topics of interest to architects...

Here is a brief excerpt from the post

We recently held a New York IASA chapter planning session to determine the topics that the chapter members are most interested in having covered at future meetings. We did a brainstorming session with about 25 of our members that resulted in a list of approximately 45 potential topics. Then the entire membership engaged in a dot voting exercise to rank the topics. The results below group them by the number of votes received. Topics in the same group were requested equally.

We thought that you would be interested in the results since they are indicative of what is on architect's minds today.

#1
Enterprise Architecture: Successes and failures, what worked and what didn’t. Lessons learned

#2
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

#3
Cloud Computing, SaaS, S+S. Offshoring and Outsourcing. Cloud Infrastructures. How Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. do it. Cloud Virtualization

While I am still pondering over applicability/future of some of these topics like cloud services, I came across another great post which discusses why enterprise today are wary of Cloud Services..

10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud

Stacey Higginbotham, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 12:00 PM PT Comments (12)

https://gigaom.com/2008/07/01/10-reasons-enterprises-arent-ready-to-trust-the-cloud/

Many entrepreneurs today have their heads in the clouds. They’re either outsourcing most of their network infrastructure to a provider such as Amazon Web Services or are building out such infrastructures to capitalize on the incredible momentum around cloud computing. I have no doubt that this is The Next Big Thing in computing, but sometimes I get a little tired of the noise. Cloud computing could become as ubiquitous as personal computing, networked campuses or other big innovations in the way we work, but it’s not there yet.

Because as important as cloud computing is for startups and random one-off projects at big companies, it still has a long way to go before it can prove its chops. So let’s turn down the noise level and add a dose of reality. Here are 10 reasons enterprises aren’t ready to trust the cloud. Startups and SMBs should pay attention to this as well.

1. It’s not secure. We live in an age in which 41 percent of companies employ someone to read their workers’ email . Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re regulated by laws such as HIPAA , Gramm-Leach Bliley Act or because they’re super paranoid, which means sending that data outside company firewalls isn’t going to happen.

2. It can’t be logged. Tied closely to fears of security are fears that putting certain data in the cloud makes it hard to log for compliance purposes. While there are currently some technical ways around this, and undoubtedly startups out there waiting to launch their own products that make it possible to log “conversations” between virtualized servers sitting in the cloud, it’s still early days. …….

3. …..

Cloud computing will be big, both in and outside of the enterprise, but being aware of the challenges will help technology providers think of ways around the problems, and let cloud providers know what they’re up against.