Last week I chaired a session at the LSE Student Strategy & Management Consulting Conference. The session was titled: The Dark Side of Cloud and Pathologies of Big Data, and we had partner-level speakers from Bain, Deloitte, PWC and Opera Solutions in attendance.

Some interesting ideas which emerged but it was the tit-bits that interested me most:

• That we should see public cloud like Taxi’s – they are very useful and a vital addition to cars, but most people will continue to want to own their own car.
• That Google is now estimated to have 3.5m servers.
• That Cloud is really about the dark-datacentre – it is about the automation of data-centre management.
• That Twitter and Facebook both began on-cloud, but as they grew they moved off-cloud. This was within an argument that as dot.com businesses expand so they move away from the cloud.
• Bain have produced an interesting analysis of the cloud market-space with important implications for those considering moving into the cloud arena. http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_five_faces_of_the_cloud.pdf

The 700 people who attended may have taken other ideas away – it was a rich session.