Does the cloud mean enterprise relationships will mimic personal ones?

Until now, the usual behaviour for enterprises is that they work together for the duration of a contract then they part. The concept of the 'Virtual Enterprise Network' is a good example; a temporary affiliation of multiple enterprises to achieve a given aim.

Contractually that might be the case, but an enterprise doesn't actually do anything; it's the people that make up the enterprise that do things, and even though the affiliation is contractually temporary, the relationships between people are permanent. 

Cloud computing can change this; it can provide a common demilitarised zone that many organisations can share. Whether it's a virtual private cloud or a 'public' cloud is irrelevant; for the first time there is a place that's permanently online, always on tap and can be made to hold to common standards. Until now, it's been a case of choosing a partner and investing in development to connect and exchange data with that partner, hoping to offset the whole lot with an ROI calculation that someone with a pot of money believes. Now, you can describe the data exchange in a common standard, hook up to a cloud solution and wait for everyone else to join in - the investment is made by the guys the enterprise pays to host your cloud solution.

This allows enterprises to form links that are more like the links people forge between themselves. How often do you de-friend someone on Facebook or LinkedIn? You don't; you keep them in your network 'just in case'. Enterprises can keep others in their network, just in case.

So the position of the cloud between organisations should allow those personal relationships to be realistically represented at an enterprise level; the links between organisation can left in place indefinitely, to be used as required, with little cost implication.

This would support Kevin Kelly's argument in What Technology Wants that over time technology trends towards complexity, for if the cloud is indeed a common DMZ then the future looks very complex with every single organisation generating more connections and never deleting old ones.

The implications are many but here are some that occurred to me:

• The walls around an organisation are destined to become ever more porous. It's unavoidable that there'll be multiple external cloud solutions that the enterprise will want to connect to. 
• Independent consultants and SMEs (with the emphasis on the 'S') could find themselves on a level playing field with much bigger organisations.
• Ultimately the enterprise could become dominated a loose affiliation of knowledge workers, rather than dedicated employees.

And it means that there's no such thing as a 'virtual enterprise network', or a 'collaboratively networked organisation', or any other variant: there's simply a networked enterprise.