The Slippery Slope of my own Soap Blog

Thursday 29 April 2010

First, a confession. I’m a blog novice – this is my first one, written for my own networking website profile and for my company’s website. So I’d very much appreciate your patience!

Second, who is Nick Pickering? I am a battle-hardened IT veteran of 18 years’ experience and have suffered the scarring of Lotus 1-2-3, IBM 386’s and Windows Vista. But I’m prepared to carry the tag of ‘another blogger’ to up my networking site profiles (and my company’s profile in the process).

This first effort will centre upon something I have a keen interest in – ‘cloud computing’. I’ve worked in an IT servicing role for so long it becomes second nature to ensure that the solutions you recommend to clients and colleagues are fit for purpose, cost effective and have a lifecycle (anyone remember Laptop Tablets?). Cloud computing is no different.

So what is cloud computing? Computers that float about in the sky? Yes, possibly, for anyone indulging in illegal substances. But for us in the IT world, it’s the direction our world is going.’ Application services housed at an alternative location other than a client’s office’ is the official term according to Wikipedia! Microsoft certainly knows all about it, having allocated two-thirds of its developers (40,000 of them) to designing, developing and producing their apps to fit into its cloud model.

I’ve seen this methodology applied before, in the late eighties and early nineties, and now I’m witnessing it again in ‘the teenies’. But instead of featuring massive AS400 super-computers that predominantly ran ERP (Accounts) systems, it is now going to be services that previously ran on that box that sits in the corner of the office on its own! Email, file access, video conferencing ... just a fraction of it uses.

So who are the major players?

Microsoft - yes, Google – yes, Amazon – yes (is that the sound of readers’ brains screeching to a halt?), and even Amazon is an affirmative. They’ve all realised that they need to offer businesses their own slice of the cloud computing cake - and they’re all fiercely competing with one another to offer free trials, email for a user for about £3 a month, spam filtering, secure connection, email encryption and forms of live video conferencing, and more ... and all for your business.

Next question. Where does cloud computing fit in?

Other grizzled IT professionals will hate me for saying it, but here goes ... ‘cloud computing will fit any company’s needs, no matter of size or market place. It can be fit for purpose for five users or 50,000. The limitations in terms of where cloud computing services can take a company are endless’.

Are there limitations to cloud computing?

Not really. Accessing emails, file access, video conferencing, intranet access... all these, and more, are bread and butter for this methodology. At present limitations of service can come from ERP/accountancy packages, but the future roadmap is long and plans are afoot for Microsoft SQL to be added to the cloud, while Microsoft Dynamics AX and even SAGE have plans to purchase and run their own data centres.

Cost savings are a big feature of cloud computing and below is a ‘real world’ instance from a recent quote I completed for a new client (bearing in mind the company I work for is Scotland’s leading Microsoft Online Services partner).

It compares a locally-housed small business server used by 10 people, that required upgrading for legacy reasons. The business primarily accessed email and files, remotely logged into webmail, and sometimes accessed a bespoke contact relationship database.

Based on a five-year life expectancy of this one server, you can see where the cost savings appear. Pricing doesn’t include consultancy as it’s not prevalent to this topic, but generally there’s 40% less work to configure a cloud computing solution than the traditional in-situ server, so work that out the next time you look at a refresh. Not included, are power costs to cool and run the server.

Description	Cost	Description	Cost
Hardware (5) Years Warranty included	£7,408	MS Online Services – BPOS Standard @ £6.71 per month	£4,026
Software/Licences	£1,989

TOTAL	£9,397	TOTAL	£4,026

The difference? A staggering 57.2% saving! And the larger the company, the more savings that can be made.

There aren’t risks associated with moving to a cloud computing solution, but what do you gain?

Beyond those mentioned above, ... disaster recovery included at no extra cost, security at no extra cost, free anti-spam filtering, free secure connections to files, access anywhere, any place, any time and most importantly ‘no downtime’.

Not even downtime from Microsoft, even with all those updates that generate so much overtime for us IT bods. Sorry, chaps, gone are those days.

So what do you think? Have the traditional IT solutions been replaced, and does the business IT consumer have more options? I’d like to hear what you think.

I am Nick Pickering, IT Manager @ Dynamic Edge Solutions