Despite what many people neatly ignore and categorize as “hype”, cloud computing is slowly but steadily gaining ground. Surprisingly, a recent Rack Space survey indicated that 67% of small business and 47% of mid sized businesses in the U.K. were not familiar with the term “cloud computing”. I am guessing here but, I think the reason that so many IT professionals are not yet familiar with this technology shift is simply down to the fact that they are swamped.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the current economic headwinds haven’t dampened the insatiable appetite for computer storage space and resources and with tighter budgets many I.T. folks are running flat out on daily tasks and are thus fully occupied in maintenance mode, this doesn’t leave any time to take a step back and consider strategic directions for the medium and long term. I have also seen some evidence to suggest that cloud computing is actively being resisted or ignored because some I.T. practitioners see it as a threat to their jobs. I can certainly understand the sentiment, after all, would you walk into your boss’s office and say;

Ever hear of cloud computing?

“hey boss!, you know all this money you pay me to keep all these systems going and all the money we spend on technology, what would you say if I told you that you don’t need to pay me any more and you can buy the same services for a fraction of the cost using this thing called cloud computing?”

Interesting scenario, huh?

In reality this situation is nothing new in I.T., as always, the technology keeps changing and getting cheaper, and tasks that start out requiring specialist I.T. skills to complete soon become mainstream, get packaged with proper user friendly interfaces and are passed off to consumers and end users to take care of themselves. In the greater scheme of things, its not that long ago that I.T. professionals were paid to take a computer out of a box and plug it in, or when an I.T. guru was required to plug a modem into a P.C. and setup an internet connection for an end user. A typical end user today is capable of doing as much (or more) as many I.T. professionals just a decade ago. Think about it, most users today can go down to their local P.C. store, buy their equipment, setup home networks, connect to the internet and create or update their web-pages / blogs or social network profiles, etc.

One interesting trend over the past number of years has been the divergence between what has been seen as corporate systems and consumer systems. For example, most corporates have adopted Microsoft Exchange or Lotus notes as messaging systems while consumers have tended to opt for Yahoo, HotMail or Google Mail. Anyone familiar with implementing and maintaining corporate messaging systems will be well aware of the complexity and cost of this endeavor and most end users don’t understand why they are restricted to small storage limits at work, especially when they can get 50 or 100 times more storage space on their personal email systems. Similar examples can be found all across the spectrum of enterprise systems. The easy (and often free) availability of consumer systems combined with restrictions imposed on end users by corporate I.T. has ignited a trend where many users tend to circumvent corporate systems in favour of their personal services.

Meanwhile there has been something else very interesting happening in the divergent paths between corporate and consumer technology / systems. While corporate systems have in my view been getting more and more complex, costly and bloated, consumer systems have become far more simple and usable. Take the example of Google Docs V’s Microsoft Office, I have used office for many years and like most everyone else, upgraded to the latest version (2007) as soon as it became available. In honesty I find the newer MS Office experience very frustrating because of a number of things including, changed file formats (I have to be mindful when sending documents to others who may not be able to open them) and a whole bunch of new complexity and features that I don’t need, want or use, added to this is the fact that I have to email myself documents to take them from home to work (or vice versa) and I frequently run into versioning problems with documents stored in many places. More recently I have started using Google Docs, Its free, simple, intuitive and I can get at my documents from wherever I go, looking through the menus I can appreciate that the functionality is far more limited than Microsoft Word, but I haven’t yet found anything limiting about it. I have stopped bringing a laptop with me when I travel and instead tend to do everything I want through an internet browser.

This all brings me to the point where I am wondering if we, as an I.T. community need to “press the reset button”?

Are we really adding value to the organisations which we serve or are we so immersed in what we do, that we simply keep blindly doing what we have always done? I appreciate that every organisation is different and many companies need to run very specialist and perhaps niche applications, however, I also believe that the great majority of corporate computer users have been given tools that are, outdated, bloated and not easy or friendly to use. To add insult to injury, we continue to invest heavily in time and money to keep many of these systems alive while users circumvent these systems and embrace technologies and services that we should probably be embracing instead of resisting.

This brings me to the main point I wanted to make, if the I.T. community continues to resist (or ignore) the adoption of cloud computing (where it makes sense), how long do you think it will take before the I.T. department and the people working in I.T. are bypassed and become irrelevant within a company? Many core services that I.T. departments provide to a company are now available to savvy end users who can actually provision the services themselves and get better service at a better price. The same trend is rapidly emerging in more significant ways, particularly in provisioning virtual servers on Amazon AWS, All you need now to setup a server farm is a credit card and a web browser.

It is my belief that we need to re-examine and understand what our users actually want to achieve. After all, does your boss, or the average employee at your company really care what server hardware you use? or what type, let alone what version of a particular type of software you use? I don’t think so! Most people just want to do their day jobs and not wrestle with the systems they use.

In conclusion, my advice would be to look around at the various different solutions you can use to help simplify your users life and pluck up the courage to walk into your boss’s office and suggest how you can make your I.T. department, your systems and your users a whole lot more efficient while simplifying the technology and reducing costs. Wouldn’t it be better for you to suggest this to your boss today, as opposed to him/her telling you that he/she has done this in six months time?

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, EC2, Google, Google Apps, Google Wave, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange