If I go down to Dublin from Donegal, I have a choice. I can take a plane, a bus or I can drive. Everyone is agreed that the plane is by far the fastest way to travel. It takes about 45/50 minutes to fly from Carrickfin airport to Dublin airport. The bus tends to be the slowest, purely because of all the stops and people getting on and off, and the fact I have to drive 20 minutes to catch it from Donegal town or 45 to catch it from Letterkenny. Driving myself is a little bit quicker. On a normal day, the car journey is probably about three-and-a-half hours.
So, on the face of it, flying is the best option. Except for the fact that the journey from home to central Dublin also involves a 40-minute drive to the airport, a 45-minute wait at the airport and at least a half an hour bus journey at the other end to get into the city (and that doesn’t include the time it takes to get from the plane and out of the terminal). Add all those on to the 45/50-minute flight and you’re talking about close to three hours.
It’s still a bit quicker but when you add in the cost of the flights, the car parking and bus fares, and the fact you’re restricted to leaving home at a certain time and returning at a set time (which could involve killing time in Dublin for a couple of hours), the cost could be significantly higher. Admittedly, it’s less tiring than trying to drive seven hours in a day but you also have less control over your movement. If you miss your flight because the bus was delayed, for example, you’re stuck there. If you’re driving yourself, you can leave whenever you want. If you miss your bus, there’s probably another one in a couple of hours.
Anyway, the point is I have a choice and I can decide which one suits me best depending on the time I want to take and the amount of money I want to spend. The same, despite the hyperbole, applies to technology. It can be hard to appreciate it sometimes because IT has had a bad habit of being all about the latest technology rather than yesterday’s or the day before’s. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that technology was just jet planes. It isn’t, it’s cars and buses too.
If I take my car or bus to Dublin, no one looks down on me for not taking the plane. But if I use slightly older technology and decide not to opt for the latest and greatest, it used to be the case some people would warn me that I was in danger of losing my competitiveness or taking risks with my business. Which is strange because even if I had gone for the plane in terms of technology, there would still be parts of my infrastructure where I’d be forced to take the bus or the car. Some data, applications and workloads don’t need to take the plane, they can get by quite happily on a bus or in a car.
Nowadays, thankfully, there’s far more emphasis on how the latest and greatest technology fits into the overall IT infrastructure, on using it where it is best suited and leaving the cars and buses to handle those parts which can carry on quite happily the way they are. In fact, the software defined trend makes a virtue of being able to choose which mode of transport to use for data, an application or workload. It’s more than happy to let some data take the bus. The same goes for the cloud. Not everything is jet-propelled in the cloud. Not everything needs to be.
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