My Digital Life

I had an interesting conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday about his PC.  It started out as one of those ‘hey Tom, you know about computers, what should I…’ chats.  He’s basically filled up his hard disk at home and wanted to know how he should upgrade.  We were looking at the prices of hard drives, and then at new PC’s so he could turn his current one into a server, then I mentioned Windows Home Server, and so on…

We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense for him to buy local disks any more.  He’s got a wireless router, so there’s network infrastructure.  He’s not doing anything that needs disk performance so speed isn’t an issue.  And the cost difference between him buying a couple of big disks to RAID and a Home Server was small enough that he’d rather go the Home Server route. 

I’ve done network storage at home for years, but that’s because I’m a geek and used those servers and an MSDN account to learn stuff.  With Home Servers and things like Skydrive now making networked/cloud storage a realistic option for people at home, thinner computers like the Macbook Air make more sense. 

I’ve been following the MS Software + Services stuff for a while now, and a post by Steve Clayton yesterday got me thinking about it again.  Skydrive and Office Live Workspace seem to me to be great little products, and free ones at that.  With Broadband now common place at home and services such as the Three mobile broadband now offering proper ‘anywhere’ connectivity targeted at consumers, cloud services now really make sense. 

How does this relate to work?  Well having worked within big SharePoint deployments and knowing first hand the amount of effort it can take to get a working solution for a big company, the idea of SharePoint Online really appeals to me.  For the most part MOSS deployments are centralised, so for most users it’ll make little difference whether their docs are in our data centre or Microsoft’s.  With Exchange and OCS also available as Online services, it becomes a very interesting proposition.  I’m guessing there’ll be challenges around authentication and identity (to name a few), but they shouldn’t be anything that MS can’t solve with federation and ILM, solutions already in their portfolio.

Exciting times ahead… (Well for a geek).

This is my problem for the next few weeks…

S+S and the other software and services initiatives from Google et al may well take away a fair chunk of the work needed to manage an effective IS service.  If we can do that we can devote our efforts away from the day-to-day ops and into making a difference elsewhere.  Sure there will still be challenges, but hopefully most of the operational overhead will be focused on service management and commercials than day-to-day technical design and admin.  So…  If I’m an enterprise customer planning my IS architecture for my business over the next few years what should I be thinking about?

The first thing that comes to mind is the cloud where all these services will live…  Where is it, and how do I get to it?  How do my users authenticate to it?  How is my information secured between the cloud and desktop?  How do my customers feel about having their data in a cloud somewhere in Redmond or Mountain View?  Might I be part of the cloud for my customers? 

The software side shouldn’t too much of a problem (famous last words!)… getting software to people we can do, but the more I can move that into the cloud the happier I’ll be!