R.I.P. Microsoft Office.

whs said:

Sorry, help a poor foreigner. What is this supposed to mean: " a lot more native ".

Cloud = On the Internet NOT on your machine.
Native = On your local machine NOT on the Internet. Can also mean specifically for the Operating System.

IF this happens its Open Office for me

I am already using Open Office 3.0

As far as businesses using "the cloud", I think a lot of it depends upon the size of the business and what they are trying to accomplish.

For smaller shops, there is appeal of using something like Google Apps to host and run corporate email. At $50 a person/month, it's cost effective over having to purchase a server to run Exchange, licensing costs for the users, cost of software to backup your environment, cost of tapes to back up onto, and the IT staff required to administer, configure and troubleshoot. Plus, employees love having access to their email where ever they go...so there is even more appeal with this online as companies don't have to setup, and maintain an outlook web access environment and keep valid certificates purchased and installed.

In addition, there are some really sweet "cloud" type VM implementations out here. Check out Amazon web services. These services allow people to quickly and easily spin up a virtual machine and use that to host, or gronk through data. And when you are done with it and shut it down, you aren't paying for it any more. So, you pay for what you use, while you are using it.

Another area where the Amazon "cloud" vm system works wonders is for a small-ish company running a few web servers. With amazon's service, you can simply have extra instances available on standby...so if you are getting ready to release a product or feature that is sure to slam your web services for awhile, the load balancing system at Amazon can fire up more instances automagically for you to handle that load and keep customers from experiencing poor performance and then when loads drop back down, these extra instances can shut back down thus not costing you anything any more. And overall the cost of this system at Amazon is very cheap. I think a fully running box 24 x 7 costs about $60 a month. And when machines spool up for a day or two...it's just a few bucks for their uptime. If you compare that to the amount of infrastructure, rack space, power usage, cooling, software costs and IT time....you can utilize this cloud for a long time and save tons of cash.

Thorsen said:

Having been with companies that manage all their systems internally. i would say a corperate cloud system that has no connection to the outside world would be a good idea but there are risks. So i will do the old Pros/Cons thing now :)

Pros:
Updating Software - With everyone accessing Word (for example) online instead of on the individual PC, updates, upgrades and version control for the software become easier to implement and maintain.

Compatibility - Compatibility Testing would be only for the interface that all programs on the Cloud run through instead of each individual program on the PC's.

Security - Laptops - If evrything is stored online, data is less able to be compromised from stolen or lost laptops. Users would not be able to save on their own computers so data would only be available by gaining access to the network itself.

Troubleshooting - If someone has an issue on why their software is not working, the helpdesk would not need to go to the Users PC, instead he/she would check the software stored on the cloud for replication of issue.

Installation and Licensing - Corperations sometimes get into trouble when people dont put the right licensing on each installation. mistakes like this cost a lot of money. installing on a server and then regulating who has access is easier than verifying each PC that has the software is licensed properly.

Transition to Cloud - right now most huge corperations already have a secure internal network, so moving towards this is less of a step.





Cons:
Working offline - if you loose connection to the network, you cant do any work. you would need a constant VPN connect whenever working away from the office. No more editing documents mid-flight.

Security - Network - RSA just got hacked to bits (pun intended) and hackers are constantly pushing the security sector. Data all stored together could be compromised if one access point is discovered and exploited. (dont put all your eggs in one basket)

Issues affect all users - while troubleshooting an issue would be easier, when an issue arises, all users are affected. So, for example, instead of one user not being able to access software on thier PC, no user would be able to access the software on the Cloud.

An excellent analysis of the issue. While non-proprietary data will probably be stored in the cloud I just can't see any company placing their proprietary/ confidential data in someone else's hands. Yup...Coca-cola will surely store the recipe for coke in the cloud and trust a third party to keep it secure....NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Firestrider said:

The data center is more reliable, secure, and efficient than your desktop at home. Intrusion detection systems, managed firewalls and anti-virus, chain-of-trust techniques, frequent back-ups, disaster recovery plans, and encryption of disk arrays and over Ethernet make sure your data is safe and always available. Physical security as far as clearance cards for doors, and protocols employees followed are also probably better than security at home. Since the data center is centralized then AC units and processors can be managed and controlled easier allowing for allocation of resources for better energy efficiency.

Even this is not 100% just the other day I had a server with a good back-up, off site redundant back-up, and redundant power supplies, disks, etc. fail. The one in a Trillion happened. The server on RAID 6 with 8 Drives that can take 2 drive failures without an issue had a 3 drive failure in the same day, this the server CANNOT handle and it ground to a screeching halt. This is a one in a billion shot of this happening, but it did. No big deal I will just restore the data to another server rebuild the original server and all will be good. 30 minutes down time max. The back-up system which is monitored and checked had a tape in the back-up cycle that was skipped. The tape is good, the back-up was good, however do to a plastic burr on the tape the tape back-up system skipped the tape without creating a message or an error the system just continued. However that tape WAS the back up for this server so now I was in a bit of trouble. Critical server down and no back-up. Not to panic I will have to let managers know that the system will be down for a few hours while I get the offsite back-up restored and brought to this site. Since the redundant back-up system is redundant the CIO at that location had decided to do a complete upgrade on the system because it was getting old about 3 year old technology. Following SOP he had emailed and sent out a Memo out-lining his plan to update this critical system noting that once it was in place that all the redundant back-up would be invalid and the tapes would be destroyed. Everyone signed off on the memo and made completely sure they had all servers running well and all on site back-ups compete and up to date. (Of course I have forgotten about all this at the time) I get on site and say I need the back-up for Server X at Location A and they tell me they had already completed the upgrade and the tapes had already been destroyed for security and safety per signed memo and CIO instructions. Needless to say server drives were shipped out for data recovery $50,000 later and the company is still trying to recover data. Without going into a tremendous amount of details the drives failed in such a way that the internal hardware destroyed the platters. Just want to keep everyone on their toes and remember Murphy’s Law!