Poor weather hampering cloud computing

BY MARK MUTAHI

A clueless official at the ICT ministry has warned that if more clouds are not found in the country soon, local cloud computing services will ground to a halt.

It is understood that for the cloud computing industry to take off there needs to be permanent cloud cover in the skies, something that has proved next to impossible in this part of the tropics.

auger

“Due to the seasonal and unreliable nature of cloud cover in the country, we are soon going to find ourselves reliant on countries with better cloud cover. And this dependence on others does not augur well for our future,” the official, a self-taught computer scientist, is quoted as having warned.

This, he cautioned while at a seminar held to commemorate twenty years since the first computer was placed in the clouds, and thus giving birth to cloud computing.

With importing cloud cover from other countries is out of the question, since the transport costs are prohibitive, this will mean that cloud computing services will increasingly be outsourced. And this, in turn, will translate to high costs for doing business in the country.

To solve the problem of lack or inadequate cloud cover, the government is putting in place measures to ensure that when a little cloud forms, it is not blown away by the wind. “Clouds are an important national resource and the government should step in, and put up invisible walls in the air that will prevent clouds from being blown away by the wind to neighbouring countries!

We have always talked about conservation of the environment, but it is time we started to talk about the conservation and preservation of clouds. This will enable us to reap maximum benefits from whatever little cloud that is formed locally,” the self-taught computer scientist suggested.

This warning from the ICT ‘guru’ comes barely a week, after the ICT sector faced yet another setback in the efforts to popularise uptake and adoption of ICT services.

This occurred when some public transport vehicles (PSV) in the county of Nairobi begun discriminating against passengers who own smart gadgets. The PSVs refused people bearing smartphones, phablets, laptops and tablets from boarding their vehicles.

overloading

They claimed that the data on these gadgets was leading to these vehicles exceeding the recommended weight limit, and therefore putting them at risk of being stopped by traffic police officers and being charged with overloading.

“These things when they are loaded with videos, songs, pictures and whatnot makes the vehicle very heavy, and we cannot risk that,” explained the chairman of the matatu SACCO. The big man at the SACCO bragged that he knew all this having once attended a course on common office applications.

saga

Even though he failed the course just as he was starting to learn solitaire and typing (which he blames on his fingers being too fat for normal keyboards!) he claims he learnt enough to know that everything weighs something and even digital data has weight.

And even before the matatu saga, there was the incident where the Ministry of Health prohibited the movement of computers from one district to another without a permit. “This is to discourage the transmission of viruses and to ensure that those computers that are infected with viruses are quarantined and contained in their home district to prevent an outbreak,” the Chief Quarantine Officer is quoted as having said at the time.