Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Your Future Office: Traditional, Cloud, Microsoft or Google?

The future office could be traditional, cloud, Microsoft or Google. Whatever an enterprise chooses, the key for success is to choose a system that could best meet the specific requirements of the company as well as the customer needs.

In today’s continuous change in business processes and customer requirements, a business needs to consider what its future office would be like. Whether it would opt for traditional computing, cloud computing, Microsoft or Google. For those who are undecided as to what office to choose, it would be a good idea to know these four choices to make a well-informed decision.

When it comes to the difference between traditional and cloud computing, the major differences is in the delivery mode or access to computing resources and the associated cost as well. In traditional computing, typically one would have to own or share the said remoter server. With traditional computing, and with an own server, it would incur capital expenses, such as hiring admins, cost of the server and physical rent among others. The cost is almost constant, whether the server is fully used or otherwise.

In the traditional method, files and data are stored with other users and often with conflicting objectives. Lack of isolation exposes to the risk of poor performance and poor security. Most probably, one has to pay fixed charges regardless of how much of the storage portion or bandwidth is actually used. The way of subscribing to storage is not automatic. If more storage is needed, the administrator should be informed and wait for the upgrade of the subscription to occur. While it may appear like automatic, in almost all instances, there is some human admins performing the dirty work at the back-end.

Cloud computing changes the story in a lot of ways. It does not required owning a remote server since it is simple to rent one off the shelf. Furthermore, there is also no need to care about sharing the storage or remote server with others. The risk of privacy, security violations and performance violation is significantly minimized. It is ‘pay as you go or use’, thus equals to great savings. With cloud computing, one is not limited to simply storage. In the cloud, one could rent just about anything, from big cluster or servers, operating systems, block storage, software development platforms and favorite app software as well. There’s been a flood of new cloud-based offerings in the market recently, while intensification in merger-and-acquisition caused main shifts in the service provider community.

Cloud works as well only as a business manages it. The key to achieve the benefits that the system promises is with a centralized, integrated IT Service Management or ITSM system that is focused to demand management, service integration and capacity management. The only way to such a system is via proactive strategies thinking well ahead of the implementation. It’s necessary to take extra care in considering the move to cloud and ascertain that the organization is culturally and practically read to gain the most from what the computing style has to offer.

Microsoft and Google are two systems that could be considered as the future office or an organization. A lot of people think that Google is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Probably in part since Google has challenge the dominance of Microsoft in the technology field. The reality is that both Google and Microsoft offer competing products and their core business does not overlap very much.

The main strength of Microsoft is the Windows operating system, which continues to dominate the desktop via Mac OS and Linus and are gaining ground. On the other hand, the main strength of Google is the big portfolio of search products, which display ads as well. Microsoft is weak in terms of search and cloud computing. Google is weak when it comes to desktop computing and operating systems. Even though Microsoft has ‘phone home’ features inside, the truth is that Microsoft isn’t engaged in the type of massive collection of data that Google is doing. Google keeps entering new markets with products having very fussy privacy rules and policies. Microsoft has been the target of privacy advocates for a long time, and thus, they have cleaned up their act since they are a massive, mature organization.

Microsoft has seen the shift to cloud coming for some time, but has been slow to adapt it. The shift demands that it moves in exactly the opposite direction from where it dominates. The founding mission of Microsoft was to put a computer on every desk in every home, bringing it from the mainframe into people’s homes, otherwise decentralizing computing. Google is on the other hand re-centralizing computing. Google remains very dominant and too powerful. It has turned into the very thing it stood against originally. It has become a snoop and bully, managing to be ignorant and defensive at the same time. It has become the internet’s Microsoft.

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