Beyond the Cloud: Cyberphysical Systems

C louds offer a novel way to revitalize the seemingly archaic concept of time-sharing. Rather than relying on fixed mainframes, clouds thrive in the Internet. Clouds offer impressive efficiencies, unprecedented collaboration opportunities, and economies of scale for all manner of networked users. Yet cloud server farms have enormously costly power consumption footprints and require massive data pipelines to transport transactions and data to and from the servers. Such connectivity means that clouds rarely stand alone. They currently rely on other equally relevant leading-edge technologies— the Internet of Things (IOT), mobile apps, and big data. Relying on the Internet, clouds both influence how the Internet is used and are influenced by the Internet’s use. When connected to banks of remote autonomous sensors, clouds become cyberphysical clouds—that is, specific cloud-based instances of cyberphysical systems (CPSs). Thus, such clouds are citizens of the IOT.1 Clouds can also offer personal value through mobile apps—for example, reinforcing the idea of Bring Your Own Device. Such apps will continue growing in number and perceived use so long as they can rely on clouds to share data across devices and connect with users. For example, we prepared this article using Dropbox, calendar, and reminder apps working across three different devices. Interestingly, the majority of the cloud-borne transactions for transferring the data to multiple devices were automatic after initial data entry. Furthermore, clouds harbor big data, be it in small quasirelated datasets or massively large data collections. Other clouds, often relying on Apache’s Hadoop open source framework for distributed data-intensive applications, broker big-data transactions and expedite novel views drawing from seemingly disparate datasets. Although few clouds freely interact with fellow or competitor clouds today, this is likely to change,2 leading to larger networks of collaborative, autonomously operating clouds, each optimized for specific services. As clouds continue to expand and eventually aggregate, a framework must emerge for understanding the resulting dynamic, nonlinear space embodied in various cloudrelated networks.