Where will my data be in 5 years time? (Part 4)

In Part 3 I talked about trust and control – how do I stay in control of my data? And I’m sorry but none of the Web 2.0 vendors make me feel comfortable enough to give them control. But I do find myself moving nearer to the model outlined by Chris Anderson in a post on The Long Tail call Who Needs a CIO?

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

The most dramatic example of this is on college campuses, where a generation raised on Google and MySpace meets its first IT department. Needless to say, the kids want nothing to do with “disk storage allocations” and “acceptable use policies”. The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

[Emphasis mine]

He then goes on to quote another article from CIO magazine which I also read:

CIOs don’t seem to care all that much about the needs and desires of the next wave of workers, who come from Gen Y and are also referred to as Millenials. The gestalt of the Millenials (a.k.a., the “I’m special” generation) is that they grew up with a boundless sense of self-importance, always have had the Internet, love to share digital content, need to be constantly challenged, want high-level responsibilities immediately, expect a work-life balance with telecommuting options, and will go around IT practices and policies without hesitation. The old-school CIOs I spoke with seemed both annoyed with their audacity and mildly interested in what this new wave of employees could deliver in the IT department.

My son is 15 today (I’ve written about him before) and this describes so many of his generation.

Where is the data in this model, and who is looking after it? Some of the data is published on blogs, wikis, etc., but what about the background data that created the published data. If my experience is typical, the published data is less than 20% of the actual data. At work I have a file service that makes this issue the CIO’s problem.

Also, who is owning the published data. I pay for this blog service, and expect it to be available, but I don’t have any SLA for disaster recovery. If I delete the data on the site accidentally it’s my issue.  If someone breaks into my house today I will have lost a lot. I won’t have lost anything that I have published, but I will have lost an invaluable amount of data. If this was a corporate blog I’d expect the CIO to provide these facilities.

I do want a dumb pipe, but I’m not sure I’m ready to take on the reasonability of looking after all of the data. What’s more, I’m not sure I know how to protect the data in a way that I am comfortable with. I could use one of the online services such as Amazon’s S3, but I’m still not sure that the pipe between me and them is large enough to get me going quickly enough after a problem. Controlling data protection within the house isn’t good enough, if someone is going to break in and steal one of the PC’s they’ll take all of the electronic equipment.

I don’t trust anyone else to look after my data, but I don’t think I trust myself either. So are there developments that would change this situation? Sure.