Why Cloud is Like Email in the 1980's

Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, took the keynote stage at the Interop trade show and recounted for the audience how the early days of the Internet are similar to the early days of the cloud.

Back in the 1980's, email systems were siloed across service providers and were not connected to the Internet. In the late 1980's, Cerf was working on MCI's email system. Actually getting connected to the Internet was a process which at the time required permission from US authorities. "In 1988, we got permission to connect MCI mail to the Internet," Cerf said. "That broke the policy log jam." Cerf added that as soon as MCI announced that they were allowed to connect to the Internet, other service providers asked for the same treatment. "So they all got connected in 1989," Cerf said. "The side effect became that all email systems then became interconnected." There is a lesson in the story in how email systems got connected and how the modern cloud is evolving. "Today cloud is like email in 1980s, it's not interconnected and now you can't interface between clouds," Cerf said. "That will change as the same pressures that got to email to get to the cloud."