Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing. Now there’s a buzzword with a happy ring. It sounds like computing above the work-a-day fray. It conjures up visions of flight—it sounds light and effortless. The cloud computing experience actually has some of those aspects for most users. It means buying access to almost unlimited computing power and never worrying about power outages, hard disc failures, port conflicts, address provisioning, system security, or a thousand other things involved in keeping a data center running.

And, in the control-freak heart of every effective library sysadmin, cloud computing stirs a fear of lost control. You can’t browse the OS logs. You can’t see what other processes are running. You can’t peer into the guts of the system. After all, what are they paying you to do?

I would venture a thought for such faithful and fearing sysadmins - cloud computing is a chance to focus more on the applications that add value to your institution and worry less about the infrastructure underneath them. SirsiDynix has, to this point, kept its newEnterprise offering SaaS only because we believe an economy of scale is required to provide fast and effective access to vast information resources. We believe that even small public libraries have to think beyond the catalog to provide meaningful information services. Recent announcements from OCLC and Serials Solutions indicate we’re not the only ones thinking along these lines.

Jared Oates
Director of Product Strategy, Engineering