What Does Google Know?
Gartner has commenced a new study of Google and its potential impact on IT, enterprise businesses, and society in general in the coming years. On April 10 at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in
The two most interesting points were:
· The best way to think of Google is as a disruptive technology.
· Disruptive technologies create big losers and big winners, and one of the biggest losers in the Google disruption could be traditional IT departments.
This new study is being conducted by a team of 15 Gartner researchers, led by Hunter, and the full report will be published in mid-2008. The title of Hunter’s presentation at ITxpo was “What Does Google Know?” The answer to that question was revealing as the slide below demonstrates.
The Gartner researchers have estimated that Google technology can address 100 exabytes of data (an exabyte is equal to a billion gigabytes). “Their infrastructure has unprecedented scale,” said Hunter, “and what is even more impressive is their ability to connect vast quantities of information… Google is sitting on the biggest pile of information that has ever been collected in the world.”
“Where the previous [computing] paradigm has been about my computer, my technology, my stuff … Google is trying to deliver any information, anywhere, to anyone in the world, on any device,” said Hunter.
“However, we also can’t forget that the Google paradigm includes massive privacy concerns. Hunter noted that Google continues to struggle to find the right balance between privacy, security, and its legitimate business interests. The more data Google collects, the bigger and more valuable target it becomes for electronic criminals. That will also make it a bigger target for governments, politicians, and citizen groups.
Hunter stated, “We believe Google’s information security will be a political issue worldwide by the end of the year in 2010.”
Here are few other interesting quotes from Hunter’s presentation, based on the study:
- “Google transcends the limits of the traditional OSI stack.”
- “We don’t know how good Google’s information security is.”
- “Google doesn’t worry about resources. Google’s always got more resources.”
- “Ask not what Google will do to you. Ask what you can do with Google … Ask how much of your business you want to expose to Google.”
- “Above all, move fast, because Google is moving fast.”
April 16th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Bravo, you did it