Dynamic clouds of people and things

The internet will not scale to support > 7 Bn people and > 50 Bn things on line, but the Cloud will, and it is neither singular nor static. Clouds are entirely dynamic and multi-modal with; public, private, personal, open, closed, government and commercial clouds that are fixed, mobile, long and short lived, permanent and transitory. In addition the new degrees of freedom Clouds afford makes them inherently more secure and resilient than any network medium we have created before. But, not all clouds are equal, and neither is all data, or indeed networks! The era of IT Departments providing centralised networking and security is drawing to a rapid close in the same way that sitting in front of a PC in an office all day is becoming unworkable. So, it is time to rethink what has to change in order to adapt to rapidly growing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and BMOB (Be My Own Boss) cultures. At the same time, ecological, social, commercial and technology demands are pushing toward more and smaller devices, the tagging and tracking of everything with the object of using less material and energy. This all demands more wireless operating over shorter range delivering greater bandwidths and new modes of mobile networking demanding more optical fibre and lower energy demands.