A while back I went to a local Oracle “high-end summit” — yes, that’s in scare quotes. Calling it a high-end summit really just meant an ad for Oracle’s current push into healthcare IT. The engineer doing the talk worked hard, doing his best to explain in plain language to a room of paunchy “decision-makers” who know nothing about databases what “cloud services” are, what “IaaS” is, what “PaaS” is, what “SaaS” is, and so on. He kept insisting the future is cloud, that storing your data in the cloud and buying cloud services would be such a great deal, so much easier than maintaining your own data with your heart in your throat. Didn’t do a damn bit of good.