Change in office Technology

Portfolio Essay

All industries go through changes throughout time. While most of the changes are small, others change the landscape of the industry. Most people today are familiar with computers and the younger generations know little different from what they are used too using currently. People buy a computer, install some applications, and they use the internet and sites like Facebook. This is all seemly the same as they have been doing virtually the same thing for the last 10 years. However, the reality is that computers have gone through some major transitions in technology and the most recent one is upon us.

By starting with a little history, it is easy to see computers have come a long way since building sized computers run by punch cards and vacuum tubes. The first major revolution was the use of mainframes with dumb terminals. As computers started towards their path into a home and small office tool, they once again changed. As the home and small office computers became more powerful, inexpensive servers and workstations replaced the necessity of the mainframe and terminal. Interesting enough is the fact that the common home computer now has many times the power of a server a few years ago. Even with all of this power, computers are again changing. This time they are becoming a truly commoditized device and even and in danger of being displaced by phones and other ultra-portable devices. The emergence of the 'Cloud' has spawned this latest change. This is only the beginning of this change and the 'Cloud' is in its infancy at this point. This leads many to ask, what is the 'Cloud'?

If you were to ask a non-technical person, what the 'Cloud' was, he or she might say it is a puffy thing in the sky that makes rain. If you were to ask a Chief Technology Officer of a large corporation, she might say that it was the future of their company. Whereas if you asked a network administrator who looks to the changes of the industry, he may say that, the 'Cloud' is the end of his career. Others would say it is a service offered over the internet, though their definitions are vastly different. As it turns out, any of those answers can be correct. There is no true definition of the 'Cloud' at this point, other than it being a catch phrase that is popular right now.

Since many of my customers over the last few years started asking for 'Cloud' services or what the 'Cloud' is. I have done some research over the last year to define what the 'Cloud' is. One of the best definitions I came across without any technical details was from an article posted at Novell "The 'Cloud' is a set of services and technologies that enable the delivery of computing services over the Internet in real-time, allowing end-users instant access to data and applications from any device with Internet access" (Novell, 2011). While that sounds great, it is vague and does not provide much technical detail to what the 'Cloud' is, why it is needed, who needs it or how to offer it.

Now that I have identifid some problems to solve I can work towards my definition of the cloud, or even better a solution that will be all encompassing as a 'Cloud Office'. The first part is going to be to define what the cloud is technicaly. Doing a search on 'cloud' brings up a plethera of services offered by many companies. One of the big standouts that really brought us the term 'cloud' is Amazon. This once aspiring book retailer, turned mega online retailer has one of the largest infrastructures in the world hosting 'Cloud' services. These services range from simple file storage to being able to run an entire infrastructure online. Other companies offer their products on a term call 'SaaS' or Software as a Service, where they host the back end data and give you either a web site or native application for interaction with the web hosted data. There are many other services that fit anywere inbetween the full blown Amazon capabilites and the 'SaaS' offerings. There are some common theme between all of the services. The first one is they are offered and accessed over the internet. The seconed one is that they are on a rental, leased or pay as you go type payement structure. No more buying or owning the product, usualy turning a large upfront cost into a monthly ongoing fee.

A sort of hidden benefit to this type of model is that there is less infrastructure requried in the business. The 'Cloud' service provider manages and maintains the hardware to provide this service. On top of that since they are providing it for many people and downtime would be a good way for them to loose business, the provider is going to have redunacies in place to make sure there is high availablity in their services. In fact if you look at Amazon's AWS services, they have datacenters all over the world and are expanding at ever increasing rates. In 2011 Amazon added as much server infrastructure to their could services per day as what their entire company had at the turn of the century when they were already a 2.8 billion dollar company. While this could be done in house to some degree, the cost would be very prohibative to all but the largest compainies. The burden of keeping the host services software up to date also falls on the provider now, rather than having to have internal IT update the servers any time there is an upgarde. Now we see why the network administrators could be feeling a bit scared for their jobs.

Now that some of the technical aspects are identified, there is still not a full definition without knowing who needs it and how it is delivered. The 'Cloud' is for anybody but the focus here is business use. In the traditional model a company would by a server, software and the requried number of workstations. Using a 30 employee example the cost of this traditional model is quite expensive. Quoting a mid range server and the related hardware from the Dell website, the hardware is about twenty thousand dollars, not including taxes. For the proper software licenseing there is Windows Server 2008 R2 to offer Active Directory for centralized user management, permisions, and security. Exchange server would be the standard for in an in house email solution, which also runs on Windows Server. Windows Remote desktop Services would provide an in house way of offering remote workers a way to do their job outside the office. All of this software is many thousands of dollars and does not include any proprietary line of business applications. As you can see in Exhibit 3 the cost break down factoring a 3 year service life on the hardware and software favors the cloud in pricing.

Traditional compuers systems are deployed in a local office or over