I must confess I hate my laptop. It is a Lenovo T400, a well styled machine but otherwise completely unfit for the purpose.  It’s big, it’s bulky, the fingerprint reader in it is loosely connected to the motherboard so it doesn’t

Cloud in Ramet, Romania

really work and I’m not to happy about the features offered by it. Of course, it’s a corporate machine so really there’s no possibility of changing it sooner than the next technology refresh in my company. So I’m stuck with it.

On top of it the IT department installed various login scrips, antivirus software with some policies I totally object to and at least two remote management tools all of which make it painfully slow.  Please, this is not to blame the IT guys, they are doing a lovely job and following all industry best practices, just this does not really mix well together with my work style. I am sure many of you are in the same situation.

In my “home” life (which includes quite a bit of work or work like activities) I use a flurry of devices starting with my blackberry, two or three computers of various sizes and power, an ebook reader, various screens, tablets and keyboards, all used in a special manner that makes them fit for a particular purpose. Amazingly enough I manage to stay quite productive, accumulate and disseminate info and generally feel good about my experience.

But there’s a gap. I can’t access my work info from my devices. This means that for whatever work related issues I want to attend at 3AM on a Sunday morning I have to pop up my work laptop, suffer trough the dehibernate phase , suffer trough the pain of Outlook and the other running applications trying to figure out what happened, where did the work docking station and the 3 screens go, where is the keyboard and the mouse that were connected to USB when the laptop went to hibernate and so on… By the way, I do not shut down my work laptop more than every other week because it takes 15-20 minutes to boot to a workable state. This is really no fun to do and wastes a lot of my time. Then there are the network drives, the VPN, ans so on…You know what guys? I am going back to sleep, I forgot what I was intending to do anyway.

On the other hand, if I have any kind of downtime at work or off work, waiting for something or someone, I can quickly log in to my personal email accounts (gmail and so), my document management system (wiki), financial reports of yahoo finance, document viewers such as slideshare and scribd, wordpress and so on. You get my point, I can do pretty much everything I do at work using internet based solutions and my mobile devices. Let’ s ignore the fact that that the online applications are also free.

All these applications are “cloud based” applications. Meaning that they do not live on my computer, they live somewhere in a far away datacenters, some are in Romania, some in the US, some are spanning multiple datacenters.  They store information somewhere close to them, the application, not on my computer, they process the information server side, not on my computer so whether I have a 200Mhz blackberry or a the latest gaming machine it doesn’t really matter because the machine only handles the input and display part, the number crunching is handled by some remote server which I might add is very good at what it does and can do the same thing for tens and hundreds of other people at the same time. All I need is an internet connection…

Since my data is spread all over the world it is surely difficult to share data between different applications

No it’ snot. The web has hyperlinks, RSS, aggregators, XML and API’s written that link pretty much anything to everything. As long as there is some data, it can be shared, usually in one step and continuous. Windows has copy-paste and that’s about it as a one step data sharing between applications method. Everything else needs to go trough a complicated process of import and export, memorysticks, harddrives and email. And none of them can establish a real continuous sharing connection between two application or people.

On the web I can share my information with other people also, my corporate applications can’t do that.

Why do desktop based applications due such a bad job as sharing? Because everybody developed their own format and the applications can’t really understand each other.

The web applications have a few very loosely defined and evolving formats that everybody sticks to and apparently are able to do all the tricks in the book. All formats/standards are open, free to evolve and extensible.

If it’s so easy to share, does security become an issue

Security it is always an issue. But may I remind you that the web knows your credit card numbers, has pictures of you and also hosts your most private email. It’s doubtful that people are willing to accept more risk than a corporation. Than look at it another way:

Where is your data safer? On your laptop than can be stolen in every coffee shop and confiscated in every (US) airport? OR in a datacenter that is built and guarded by professionals?

There is a false sensation that putting your data in the cloud makes it more vulnerable. I disagree to that. Most corporate data is one password away anyway, whether is remote email access or VPN access. No change there. However I truly believe that overall, data is more secure in the cloud because it’s less vulnerable to virus/spyware/troyan/theft/tampering/etc than on your average corporate laptop. There is a question on where will the data live and who will own it. Companies should use large cloud computing providers that bring economy of scale. There always will be those who prefer to have their own setup.

I am guessing that sooner or later all companies will afford their own cloud and storage/server vendors will offer “cloud in a box”, “cloud for starters” and “cloud small business edition”.

But I will not be able to work from home/on the road

Yes and no. Online/cloud based applications are not for everyone right now. However an internet connection is becoming a given everywhere in the world and the move towards ubiquitous internet is clearly happening. Will it mean that you will be permanently online? Probably not too soon. A well written web application can already store data (hopefully encrypted) on your harddrive and can make use of that data even when disconnected from the internet.  If you think of it this is pretty much the same way Outlook or your blackberry is working when you are disconnected. It’s perfectly usable and it syncs flawlessly every time you go back online.  Probably this is the direction the web applications will be taking also and plugins/frameworks such as Google Gears will provide a “standard” and easy way for developers to build their online/offline applications.

What will this all mean for the IT department

The IT department will change once again. I am hoping that the next generation of endpoint devices will be unmanaged or loosely managed. Let every employee use whatever he wants to access the corporate applications as long as he is using a standards compliant browser. Unmanaged endpoint devices on the corporate network sounds crazy right now and it probably is. There needs to be a transition phase in which we move all the applications to the cloud while still managing endpoint devices and than, once the endpoint devices do not handle data so much, we can actually start using secure operating systems on laptops and desktops. It only needs a browser.

In the last phase we need to shrink our corporate networks since users will sit on the internet or at least on a network where the security level is internet like.

Dropping the need to manage user devices will bring some important savings to the IT department. Now we only need to focus on managing our cloud properly. We only need storage specialists, web server admins and some network engineers. There is one other advantage to this schema: IT departments will become a lot more flexible and versatile.

All you data and applications sit in a centralized location which means the applications are easy to configure, upgrade and update.

You no longer need a cohort of sys admins, support staff and network guys to coordinate an application upgrade on endpoint devices. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, all upgrade their applications daily and I don’t see them sending out notifications to users.

What will this mean for software companies

With such agile IT departments it will be easy to switch software suppliers. If the new supplier can provide you a better licensing model, a lower load on your cloud and a faster back engine while still keeping the same user interface, you could change vendors over night and nobody would notice (hey, you could own the user interface in an XML/XSLT, you only buy the back end).  Competition will be good for the market and Microsoft is stupid if the next generation of Office will not be completely web based.

Endpoint devices are a different story. Users will start demanding securer more agile platforms with quick start up times and very good browsers. Pretty much all applications can  be sent to the cloud as soon as it will be cheaper and fast enough to send something to be centrally processed instead of doing it locally. Windows will not become obsolete too soon because users are familiar with it. However it needs to become more secure and less bloated and start adhering to open standards, drafts and initiatives and work a lot more with the community.

For the purpose of full disclosure, I used to work in a company that is implementing a cloud environment, here are some resources:

• Bechtel Harnesses the Cloud: Case Study of an Enterprise Cloud
• Cloud Computing to the Max at Bechtel
• The Google-ization of Bechtel