From Life on the Farm to Life in the Clouds

Before I ask the question, let me answer it: ‘yes, but it depends’. There you go, one sentence and you are totally clued in – rush out and share your new found expertise with whomever you meet. Ok, may be I should wind back a bit.

In the 90′s, IT departments installed LAN servers by the crate-load, giving a central place to share and store data. However, it also meant that you needed network access to get to it. When the network went down, access to your data went with it. Hence Cisco’s slogan in the 90′s: The network works, no excuses.

These days, the defacto network platform is the Internet. We have more and more ubiquitous connectivity, enabling a new generation of apps that have escaped from behind the firewall-locked server farm, into the free-world of the Internet.

It is now easier than ever to process and backup data, share it between companies and individuals, and access it across multiple devices. These applications are still vulnerable to network outages, but the more distributed nature of cloud-based services should, in theory, make them more robust than the previous generation of applications that lived in the server-farm.

Many of the initial applications have been consumer orientated, but that is changing. On one side, IT itself is increasingly consumerised, and on the other, applications themselves are becoming more business centric (SalesForce.com ecosystem, backpack and highrise HQ, etc…).

Businesses now have low-cost access to what were once very expensive applications. We are now in the perfect storm, where IT departments can leverage Internet technology (standards, bandwidth and computing power) to deliver new applications to users.

More on these new services and platforms in the coming weeks…