Letter from the Editor

By: Tim Young - do not use (default)

—“Castle on a Cloud,” from Les Misérables

By the time you read this, the film version of the famed musical Les Misérables will have probably amassed a few hundred million dollars in box office receipts, and viewers around the globe will have one of its impassioned solos mercilessly stuck on repeat in their heads for the foreseeable future.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but I have been fortunate enough to catch the stage play twice — once in New York and once in London. It’s a true spectacle, and I hope the film does it justice. But I’m not quoting the musical here so I can hitch my wagon to the cultural zeitgeist generated by the movie. Or at least that isn’t the only reason I bring it up.

In the play, after the loss of her mother, young Cosette toils away in a threadbare inn owned by her so-called caretakers, a pair of miscreants who treat the girl less like a foster child and more like an unpaid laborer. She escapes into her dreams, where she lives in a joyful castle perched atop a cloud. There is no arduous labor, and no one cries. Instead, the world is all toys and lullabies.

However, it seems you don’t have to be a fictional waif to exaggerate the wonder of a safe, warm place on a cloud. The cloud has been lifted up as a solution to any number of computing woes, and consumers and enterprises have grown to rely on it more and more, creating challenges and opportunities for CSPs.

In this issue of Pipeline we check out the realities of the digital cloud. There are no castles there, but security is certainly a consideration, topic and opportunity we examine. We also discuss the impact that the proliferation of mobile devices has on the cloud, and vice versa, as well as the desirability of becoming a data center in the age of the cloud. We hear from Sprint and Netformx on the potential for profitability that enterprise cloud services present, and from CHR Solutions on the rise of the cloud-as-a-service model.

We also bring you the latest in communications IT news and opinion to help ring in the New Year.

All the best,

Tim Young
Editor-in-Chief