Cloud computing and taming the desktop

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that has come to mean everything and nothing depending on your perspective.



Cloud computing is neither good or bad: it is increasingly an element of planning and strategy even for small to medium organizations. It is new technology that happens to correspond to, accelerate and enable us to respond to larger economic and social trends. At the risk of oversimplifying, I tend to break it down to two challenges and three opportunities.


Two Challenges

Cloud computing wrestles with two fundamental challenges of the modern computing era: infrastructure and the desktop.

Without a doubt, the bits and pieces of organizational infrastructure have gotten cheaper. Putting all those hardware and software pieces together, managing them, securing them, updating them, backing them up, and ensuring 24x7 global up-time remains challenging and expensive.

In the current recession, cloud computing has become the means to translate technology from capital costs to operating costs. That is, instead of investing in longer terms cycles of network servers, other office hardware and software, cloud computing says, pay as you go over the Internet. Business planning articles have commented on this as an imperative about this recession—with which the maturing of cloud computing happens to coincide.

Formerly, organizations planned on upgrading locally installed network servers every three to four years. Or should have. The cost of not doing so might be a catastrophic failure with days of down time. The cost of an upgrade includes new hardware, usually new network software to be compatible with the new software, ancillary updates to security systems, back-up software, email software and so on. The cost also includes migration, planned instead of emergency downtime, reconnecting desktops and lots more. Big costs, hard to consistently budget for, particularly in a recession, and particularly for smaller businesses and nonprofits in recessionary environments.

These one-time costs can be enormous even if the pure cost of a server has gone down. Cloud computing aims to turn these capital outlays into ongoing operational costs. They can be metered as usage grows or retracts instead of planned over multiple year period.

Cloud computing also can alleviate the budgeting for support costs. It’s not that there’s necessarily less to watch or do. It’s more the scale and scheduling of support these days. Even if system consoles have become somewhat more straightforward to manage, the burden of responsibility may not have. More organizations support staff working at home or in the field at odd hours. More organizations have multiple offices or close partners sharing systems. More organizations maintain connections between internal data systems and their website. These all imply closer and closer to 24x7 support, even if an organization nominally has traditional office hours.

The other big challenge on the mind of IT strategists today is the desktop. Twenty five years or so into the “PC Revolution,” we’re grappling with what to do with the desktop. We all wanted its promise; now we have to contend with the consequences. Desktops have become more and more powerful. As they do, they also become more and more difficult to tame and manage.

Before PCs, everything ran off of servers, and desktops were relatively cheap, dumb, easy to maintain. Support was centralized on the server. While those servers and related infrastructure cost more, support costs were perhaps more predictable.

Even as purchase costs for a new office computer drop, analysts still consistently talk about total costs of ownership to a business or organization dwarfing that initial cost. (I’ve recently heard 15% as current ratio of initial to total cost.) The total cost includes acquiring and configuring the computer, maintaining it with security and software updates, supporting its users, and then managing its replacement down the road. Windows-Mac-Ubuntu each have their proponents in this regard. Travelling around to different offices, I see universal complexity on the typical staff person’s desktop and unending monthly support requirements.

Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It” (http://futureoftheinternet.org/ ) writes about the fundamental openness of the PC environment. And this is true whether Windows, Mac or Linux. By their nature, unlike earlier devices that sat on office workers’ desks, they provide endless choices for installing software and configuring things. Endless choices mean endless headaches for IT staff.

Troubleshooting why some configuration no longer works on a particular machine (it is hardware? Software? Malware? User error?...) is probably the least fun part of an IT dept’s week. Zittrain argues for keeping that creative openness against the forces that want to put computer usage back into “walled gardens.” (This is the “future of the Internet he wants to stop.) Yet he also recognizes the pressures facing IT departments in wanting to lock things down or limit choices.
It would be hard to impossible to imagine giving up the computing power now at everyone’s finger tips on their desktop. The challenge is to provide that power with less support complexity.

Three Opportunities

From two challenges come three opportunities: “Software as a Service,” “IT as a service,” and “Platform as a Service.”

Software as a Service means taking strategic business or organizational software applications and moving them up to the web as pay as you go services. For example, on a small scale—Constant Contact. On a large Scale—Salesforce. Things run in the browser and operate like household utilities.

Platform as a Service takes a similar model and provides software developers the tools to build complete applications. For example, instead of doing your own Drupal thing, you develop complex sites from within the Acquia Drupal Platform.

IT as a Service (or Infrastructure as a Service) aims to move your whole network infrastructure out of your office and up onto the web somewhere. Instead of worrying about configuring Outlook on everyone’s desktop, everyone uses the same desktop software image centrally maintained and managed.

The first two of these meet the challenge of the desktop by minimizing what runs there versus what runs in your browser. IT as a Service meets the challenge by taming and centralizing what runs on the desktop. All three aim to reduce the capital expense footprint of IT. There is more to say. (For one thing, I've oversimplified a bit what Acquia and Salesforce offer). In part II (yes, sorry, there is a part II of this), I’ll assess these three a bit more.