Digitalisierung

A few thoughts on Disruption

… In the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution there are a lot of buzz words in every presentation. You can go to any conference or read just about any technical article and you will find at least some of them. What’s often missing, however, is reflection regarding what these terms mean in the context of industry. What will we gain? What will we lose? Why and in what ways are we being disrupted? And when we look a bit more closely at what’s going on, we must admit that technology itself isn’t disrupting anything. It’s the applications of technology that are shaking things up.

Take the Cloud, for instance. This is a general term that’s often applied indiscriminately to all sorts of developments in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But in point of fact, the Cloud is simply the core infrastructure that is used to deliver hosted software services over the Internet.  A cloud is typically hosted in large, centralized data centers around the globe and its services are usually sold “on-demand,” typically by time of usage or storage volumes. The major benefit of the Cloud compared to a traditional local server-based infrastructure is that it is elastic, which means that associated computing and storage resources shrink and expand to meet the user’s changing needs. 

However, in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, access to the Cloud via the Internet and its often globally distributed infrastructure has engendered concerns regarding data residency, privacy and security. These concerns are particularly intense in those industries where intellectual property plays a key role. For example, it is easy to see why a pharmaceutical company that has spent tens of millions of dollars on research to develop a new medication will resist the temptation to upload any of its process-specific data to the cloud that might allow reverse engineering of its recipe. …