‘You’re not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. This is the end of Windows.’
October 20th, 2012I run IT for a small business here in the Far North of New Zealand as a favor to family members.
While it’s a small business, it’s one of the largest employers in the region. The employees are decentralized and I thought about establishing the right kinds of network connections and remote access systems, servers, backup power supplies, etc. and then I thought, “Is this even necessary anymore?”
No, it isn’t. Not for this business, or countless others like it.
I set them up on Google Apps. No servers.
That’s right. No servers.
This business runs on residential (that is, crap) grade DSL connections, mobile broadband, free Wi-Fi in town and “smart” phones. If the main facility was turned into a smoking cinder, or washed into the sea, or whatever, all that would be necessary to resume operations would be commodity devices and an Internet connection. The data that they rely on is in the cloud by default (with local cache for when the intertubes are broken).
As they got down to making-do with this stuff (despite Google Apps being not-so-great in a lot of ways), I thought to myself, “IT workers are even more doomed than before.” I’d burned out on this sort of work back in 2002, so it was over for me on a personal level way back then. I went back that last time around 2004 after I met Becky so that we could buy our place. But now… If organizations are able to shitcan their server rooms… HA! Fill it to the rim with Grim!
I know, Mr. IT, you snicker, but it’s going to go like this: The IT jobs are increasingly going to fall into two broad categories, 1) near minimum wage level hardware set-up and swap-out monkeys on the client side and 2) people who can build and maintain warehouse-scale megasystems, colloquially known as, “the cloud.”
If you think that the cloud is a passing fad, you’re wrong. It’s like voice over IP. Remember how crappy VoIP was in the early days? Having to “Reboot the phones,” etc? No matter how many problems people have with VoIP, it’s too cheap not to use. Cloud computing makes the savings companies realized from VoIP seem like pocket change. Cloud computing allows companies to eliminate rooms full of expensive, power hungry hardware, the support systems, and more importantly, the jobs of the people who built and maintained all of that stuff. And since IT is THE most hated division in organizations, even better.
Anyway, I need to go feed our chickens…
Via: Eweek:
“The big catalyst of the next shift in the enterprise is Windows 8,” Benioff said. “People are asking do I go to Windows 8 or not,” he added, calling the situation a “gambit.” However, “This was not the case with Windows 7. You heard about the Windows 7 upgrade cycle; you’re not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. This is the end of Windows.”
During his keynote, Benioff described various eras of computing, from the mainframe era in the 1960s to mini-computing in the ‘70s, to client server in the ‘80s, cloud computing in the ‘90s, mobile computing in the 2000s and social computing in the 2010s.
Benioff said you can go to any AT&T store and find any number of devices you can use in BYOD environments, such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets, among other things. “You didn’t have this kind of choice 48 months ago,” he said.
Meanwhile, also helping to spur the shift in the enterprise is a changing of the guard, Benioff said.
“The next generation of leaders has come up and the last generation is going out,” Benioff said. “A lot of the people who made that Oracle or Microsoft [purchase] decision are no longer there. The new people in there are modern, up-to-date, and they have a new brand preference. How they view technology is different.”
Moreover, fast wireless technology such as LTE is changing the game, too, Benioff said. The next generation of LTE technology is going to eliminate the need for LANs and WANs, he said.
“With this networking, everything is moving to the cloud,” Benioff said. “We are on a train and we’re not getting off it.”
Kevin, I’ve got an alternative you might like, called FTPbox.It’s exactly like Dropbox but hosted on your own server (shared or dedicated).
There’s a desktop and web-based client you can use and you can assign your own drop folder on the server and on the pc. The app has notifications for when files/folders are added/deleted/changed and all that, too. Great for teams who work remotely but want to stay organized and in sync with a centralized data bank.
Works with SFTP as well. I use it personally because it’s open-source, I retain all control over my files and everything remains private.
Yeah you do need a server, but if they don’t have one just get them to sign up for a cheap bluehost account via your affiliate link!
I was pretty shocked when I read that you had gone with a Google product so thought I’d at least provide you with some kind of alternative. Anyway, worth having a look…
http://ftpbox.org/
Shocked. S H O C K E D! The horror of it all.
Be sitting down: I also mostly use Google to search for things, and I use Windows 7 on my main system. *gasp*
Thanks, but FTPbox is not an alternative to Google Apps. Calendar, contacts, chat, multiple users able to edit documents simultaneously, two factor authentication. There’s a lot more to Google Apps than file sharing.
Even if I was being paid to do this, which I’m not (well, besides the occasional nice meal), and even if there was big money available for infrastructure, which there isn’t, I’m not sure that I would do it any differently. My goal is to keep the phone from ringing, not to be able to claim that I use open source software. Google Apps does what they want, they’ve had 100% uptime, the cost, so far, has been free. And once they cross into requiring paid tiers of service, it’s cheap.
As much as we all like to hate Google, there’s a reason why millions of businesses use Google Apps: It’s a good value.
Also, FTBbox is beta software.
http://ftpbox.org/faq/
FTPbox is in beta? What does that mean?
It means that the project is not yet complete. It means that FTPbox is still missing some big features, and that it might not be very stable.
Hi Kevin,
Gotta admit -and say -I was pretty surprised too. Perhaps not so much that you’d use Google apps in this situation but so seemingly willingly, so unreluctantly, no matter the lack of alternatives anywhere near as facile -especially with family relations.
‘Hate’ Google? Me, I’m more dispassionate about it; I just think it’s just a really bad idea to utilize intermediaries whenever and however, and given the push to do so more and more, resistance for it’s own sake seems strongly called for. Or at least agony! Anything but encouragement.
There’s a lot more technically involved than I grasp and I’m sure I miss a salient aspect to it all (or two) but there’s reason to be surprised, I do believe. Regardless, thanks for the frank disclosure.
I look (fantasize?) to a future where more and more the internet itself is bypassed. Heck, I even look to one where not all computers that are sold are so tacitly assumed to intend to be networked at all in any fashion but I digress.
@Zuma
Ah, I should experience agony. *chortle* That’s great. And if I’d used a non-Google solution, would I have received a Gold Star of the Resistance?
You admit that you don’t grasp what’s involved, so maybe you should educate yourself on the options before making lame assumptions about my decision.
Here you go:
http://socratechseminars.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/gappsalt/
Show me something that’s cloud based, free for under ten users, supports simultaneous edits and two factor authentication (in NZ) and I might consider it.
Since I, “so willingly, so unreluctantly” etc. did this, let’s see your brilliant solution.
This is quite fascinating, actually. I would have predicted Kevin to be fairly anti-cloud. At the same time I find my own self increasingly using, and appreciating, and recommending, cloud based apps and functions. They just work, and the ease and convenience of transcending chronological, geographical, and hardware boundaries are so seductive. Part of me still does not trust the security of cloud on both privacy and reliability fronts, but I long ago trained myself never to put anything into a computer that I wouldn’t be okay with the whole world seeing. And I have a fetish for back-ups and redundancy anyway. (It’s the prepper in me!) Admittedly, I am working at a very small scale here, but am fascinated to get a glimpse of Kevin’s thinking on this subject.
Kev,
Well, yeah, Google based apps is the lesser of two evils for sure, and it’s your vote (so to speak), but I don’t know that there is *any* brilliant cloud-based solution. That’s what I was saying in speaking of the challenge of minimizing intermediaries and the surprise of a seeming easy embrace; the lack of the recognition of the technological herdchuting of it all. Agony, heh, yeah there’s a touch of humor meant there, recognizing as I do that hand-wringing is by itself an empty attitude.
I gather this business network can’t be simply served by a LAN. It appears to me some new idea of a LAN in general -some new approach -might be called for. To immediately address this business, family related as it is, may be a case aside, but isn’t there a challenge here to be recognized?
What is the state of the art with packetradio technology for example? I don’t know, but maybe you do.
http://cryptome.org/2012/09/packet-network-protocol.pdf
leaves me scratching my head.
I make no lame assumptions about your decision and wish to make none of your worldview, and so spoke up.
The political analogy I made above, to what we’re faced with technologically, seems apt. The birth of the culture-jammers of the 60’s slammed right into the challenges made by the realpolitik approach and policies by people like Kissinger et al who certainly could say ‘rebellion is one thing but what do you offer?’ but sometimes these things can’t be quantified. It’s a matter of conscience and like minds congregating in congruence. I don’t know if paradigm-shifts can be flatly engineered but any effort to do so begins with the recognition of the need to do so and begins at home. For all their gun-waving, the Panthers fed people. For all their street theatre, the Diggers fed people. At the levitation of the Pentagon, Ellsberg went inside and ended up standing alongside McNamara staring out at the scene and wondered what he was thinking, generously allowing that it was at base sympathetic. I suspect McNamara was seeing the foreshadow of OWS. I believe he was. Decentralization.
Doing away with dedicated servers is one thing but replacing them with subservience to a cloud may be a difference of kind with greater if less immediate consequences.
I don’t want to make lame assumptions, nor challenge you inadvertently or otherwise, but I also don’t wish to regret having registered my surprise. You may perhaps think I’ve taken Eben Moglen too much to heart. That would surprise me. In any case, surprises are better than lame assumptions IMHO, for all their edification.
@ideasinca
I would have predicted Kevin to be fairly anti-cloud.
I am anti-cloud, for my own information. The number of personal/private documents that I store in any cloud based system: Zero.
There are, however, some very interesting ways in which cloud services are being used. For example:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57534707-93/pirate-bay-ditches-servers-and-switches-to-the-cloud/
It’s not just pirates. A number of mainstream business tools are emerging that are designed to prevent cloud providers from being able to see the data that they are storing. I very rarely advocate the use of individual security solutions, but if you search for these, you’ll find them pretty easily.
Google Apps security is potentially quite strong VS. outside (non-state) attackers. But, out of the box, your information is not secure VS. Google at all.
FYI: I use personally use TrueCrypt and Thunderbird-Enigmail-GnuPG for my own stuff.
From inside IT, and mostly on the keep-servers-running end, I can say I pretty much agree with Kevin as to the direction corporate IT is going.
At the very least, dedicated management of racks of hardware is almost all going to get outsourced to cloud providers, Amazon AWS, etc. The overhead and hassle of of managing hardware is a business everyone wants to get out of. Individual contracts for colo space. Contracts for power and cooling. Contracts for colo support personel when a database needs physical action at 3am. Arrangements for colo access by corporate IT employees. Contracts for hardware support, Bidding wars with vendors to get the cheapest/fastest supported RAID setup under linux.
It never really ends, and every tech-centered startup and large computer-dependent corporation – which is pretty much every corporation at this point – deal with this. And every last one of them would be gloriously happy to stop doing so.
In-house IT isn’t going away right away. But the need to have people who know how to manage hardware and the necessary kind of supporting arrangements is going to decrease, as those roles are centralized into the big cloud providers, who specialize in providing cheap, high availability computing power.
And desktop support? Managing endless licenses of overpowered desktop software for the legions of office workers who really don’t need more than basic word processing, or simple spreadsheets, and who need more than anything easy collaboration with those documents…It’s not a hard sell. It gets even easier when you start factoring in the benefits of not worrying about maintaining local installs of the software, not sweating updates yourself, the fact that employees can work anywhere on any internet connection.
I’m pretty sure offices in 10 years will all be just rows of desks with little docking stations for the ubiquitous smartphone everyone will be carrying, and it will have become the thin client that actually works. The bean-counters will be really, really happy about this.
FWIW, the privacy issues surrounding data in the cloud give me hives. But I know those concerns, even if widely shared, are not going to stop the Great Conglomeration of Data that’s going on.
zeke