In a previous post from November 2014, I discussed the rise of Bring your own Application. This resulted in some very nice discussions on the topic. Some with strong believers who state that even bring your own device is a concept which leads to mass abuse of your sensitive company data, others with people who have an extreme sense of freedom and think they have the ability to craft their own full blown professional back- and frontoffice system out of the cloud for max 300 euro.

The best discussions led to a debate into what extend we can combine computer technology with some other disciplines in science. In his very inspiring book, the Medici Effect, Frans Johansson already addresses that best innovations come at the crossroad where different disciplines meet. Hence the reference to the Medici family, who brought all different kind of disciplines to Florence which led to the start of the Renaissance.

If we take the hypothesis that Bring your own Application is a reasonable scenario, we can look at other disciplines as an inspiration on how to solve the security issues. In this case I would like to take the example of Biology. The Human body is a complex phenomenon, consisting of lots of cells, each with different functions. Although the Human can be considered to be a machine, there is no direct control mechanism to influence the behaviour of the cell, other then sending other cells towards the wrong behaving cells to re-install order in the system. The cell itself however, is completely independent and through coding interacting with the rest of the human body.

If we take the Bring your own Application into perspective, we can create safe environments. But we can only do that if we treat the data as cells. How can we come to a next level of computing by which “data-cells” can act freely and by some kind of “super middleware” flow through the internet, like the human cells flow through the human body.

This requires a different approach of thinking around the data as cells, with intelligence how to flow, where to dock and what to transmit. If you can reach that point, we can build a truly open internet where our design options become limitless.

Security will be done by the Health cells who can help track and trace the bad data cells, or in the receiving program codes where we build our health system (and not even being dependent on almost resistent antibiotics).

Perhaps the promise of an advanced version of Micro services, perhaps too far fetched for real life practice. But thinking about potential crossroads and actively seeking the Medici Effect remains a nice exercise to train the brains during Christmas Holidays.