This emphasis on Cloud 2 and social media does not eliminate the importance of local network and security infrastructure. It increases our demand for bandwidth and the need to control the bad guys who are also attempting to use those same networks.

The most significant danger of this move to cloud computing is expressed by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, as attributed in Wikipedia, “cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time. It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian. “Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

Understanding that Richard Stallman’s cautions regarding cloud computing are true, and also that Marc Benioff‘s statements describing Cloud 2 and Social Media describe the present-future, is not a contradiction.

For the organizations that I work with, this means being nimble footed and not tying allegiances too tightly to particular closed proprietary systems. It also requires that investing forward, they invest in the best network infrastructures and the most flexible security systems for those networks. Bandwidth will allow them access to the media choices that they will be making and for which they don’t yet have a known need. Flexible security systems will be defined by allowing the organization the choice of full interaction within the social media networks and keeping the bad guys and their tools out of those systems.

There are so many questions an organization needs to ask itself about the usefulness of any given strategy in the social media networks. There so many choices about when, how, and how much to be involved in these tools. But they are just that—tools. We need to be equipped to know which tool fits which job.

The first part of the social media infrastructure that needs to be laid is our exposure and education, so that we can make choices. The second piece is adequate bandwidth/access and flexible network security. The two pieces go hand-in-hand and it is unfair to put one first and the other second. These are the technology infrastructure concerns that all organizations have at the beginning of this decade. Operating system platforms and software choices are secondary and will be limited by bandwidth/access and network security.

So say I. What do you think?