The cloud in business: from simple storage to shared work

The cloud in business: from simple storage to shared work

One of the transitions that, in my capacity as professor and business advisor, I am able to observe in greater detail is the movement of companies towards services based on the so-called cloud computing or simply "the cloud": officially or , In many cases, simply by way of fait accompli, many companies are starting to find themselves in a highly confusing environment, where many employees adopt consumer-based solutions like Dropbox to obtain distributed work benefits that the company In many cases, it does not provide them.

A couple of days ago, GigaOM claimed, citing a Nasuni study titled "Shadow IT in the Enterprise," that one in five employees used Dropbox for work documents, even though more than half of them knew that such use Was contrary to corporate policies. With more than 100 million users, Dropbox has become the authentic secret of many companies, in the weapon that employees use to work in conditions of certain comfort with their documents from different places, from home or in mode shared.

My doubt, however, is to what extent this type of use is a real advantage. Let me explain: In the first phase of corporate work systems, that Paleolithic in which many companies unfortunately still find themselves, documents were created in the Microsoft Office: managers absurdly used almost more of their precious time in formatting them than in Write them, and if they wanted to share them with other users of the company, they sent them as an attachment in an email. The system, obviously, is aberrant in terms of productivity: every time the file is sent a copy of it is generated, that it has "own life", to be potentially altered in different versions, and that it is necessary to reconcile later Either manually or through version control (I honestly doubt the mental stability of anyone who has been forced to use version control frequently).

The use of Dropbox is an evolution from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic: instead of carrying out an absurd process of successive duplication, or worse, of managers who seem to be schizophrenic with personality splitting constantly sending themselves documents, the file "is made Sedentary ", is uploaded to a location centralized in Dropbox and is shared from there. A breakthrough in terms of performance, even though IT managers may think it's an aberration in security. But is it really a breakthrough in terms of workflow? In the background, the file is downloaded by each user, the use is not concurrent, and the work is still uncomfortable and cumbersome when we reach the point, often necessary, to reconcile different versions. Dropbox and similar cloud storage systems are undoubtedly an improvement, but except for certain one-off uses, I'm not sure they are what businesses need in their workflows.



The true evolution takes place when the element that is shared is a document with which it is really working in shared mode. Google Drive, Zoho or similar systems completely revolutionize working methods by proposing that a person simply send a link to others with whom he wants to collaborate, and that, when they open the link, they appear in a single document in which Can see in real time the movement of their cursors and the evolution of their changes, and also have chat tools in a window on the right of the screen. This methodology, which in the case of IE Business School many students began to adopt long before we finally offered it officially, is the one that really revolutionizes the methodology of work, but is what I still see as a great stranger in the Majority of companies.

When companies adopt a methodology based on shared documents - or even beyond, in doc-less models on which we will speak another day - is when the result is truly noticeable. That several people collaborate in a single document has some "revelation": from a minimum period of adaptation, it looks as natural as if it had always worked well, and to return to the version system is completely unthinkable. Everyone believes they understand what it means to work on a single document, but few have done it seriously and have seen what that philosophy really brings. In fact, my experience is that, on many occasions, a shared document with a reasonable number of people working on it and the open chat window can advantageously replace a work meeting, both in terms of productivity and degrees of Freedom for its participants. We speak, simply, of a superior methodology.

If we really want to provide tangible benefits to our employees and take advantage of technology advantageously, we must move from a philosophy of documents residing on users' hard drives to one in which all documents, by basic principle, reside in a personal repository With the possibility of being shared at the level of each document with the corresponding permissions. Storage on a remote hard drive, to the Dropbox, may seem like it has its advantages, but it is not, as such, a breakthrough. At least, compared to what we can get in the next phase. And again, we talk about options that any employee can adopt easily regardless of what the corporate IT department says, with all that entails. In the hands of these departments, it is not enough to ensure that this productivity and benefits revolution takes place, but also with a minimum of control and in the right conditions: if they do nothing, the adoption will eventually take place, as In the case of Dropbox, by way of fait accompli.

Microsoft, in the clouds

Microsoft, in the clouds

On the 4th, Steve Ballmer participated in a webcast at the University of Washington, and made an important statement: that Microsoft's future is in the cloud. To illustrate this assertion, he provided a couple of data: not more than 70% of the company's more than 40,000 employees are working on cloud computing initiatives today, and the percentage is expected to come To 90% next year.
The statement is extremely interesting because it clearly marks a before and after in the strategy of a company that many still consider linked to its image of the last decade of the twentieth century, the idea of ​​a completely computer-centric world. But aside from interesting, Steve Ballmer's statement would have to fit it into the most important transformations ever suffered by a company: it is quite pertinent to illustrate the news with the graph recently published by Business Insider analyzing the sources of Microsoft's benefits: These come from the licenses of Windows, Office, and the products and tools for servers. The chart provides very revealing data: the games and entertainment division, the often acclaimed XBox, provides intermittent profit and loss, and maintains a highly discrete net performance, while online services represent a growing source of losses. The contrast with the same graph applied to Google, where profits come in overwhelming majority of an activity, advertising on sites managed by the company, completely linked to the network, makes clear the extent of competition between both companies (and The possible vulnerabilities of both). But they also allow us to assess the magnitude of the change that Ballmer describes in his speech: a change that is clearly necessary, but which will mean turning the company up and down like a real sock.
That Microsoft can make such a strategic turn is something positive for everyone: competition has always been a good thing. But because of its "shady past", we also have to be very aware of the conditions of those services in the cloud that the company proposes: one of the key factors to take into account in the evolution towards a world in the cloud is Interoperability and the opening of different systems, which prevent clients from being captive to a given option due to the absence of valid standards of generalized acceptance. Having saved those details, a temptation in which we hope that the company of Redmond does not fall again, the strategic turn of the company can be described as of very good news.

Dell Ophelia: PC deconstruction

Dell Ophelia: PC deconstruction

Something important is happening at Dell. On the one hand, strong rumors of changes in the structure and a possible exit of the NASDAQ from the hand of some kind of management buyout. On the other hand, a project, Ophelia, with a name inspired by the character of Hamlet, and a completely atypical aspect for the company: a device no larger than a USB disk, plugged into a screen and connected wirelessly To the network and to a keyboard would allow the execution of practically any operating system in the cloud, and that would be sold to a final price of about fifty dollars.

Strictly speaking, we would be talking about an ultra-compact cloud connection device with an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system capable of running virtualized instances of any other operating system on a server in the cloud. A concept that would come from the recent acquisition of Wyse, and that could have much interest as a possible disruption in this environment. That the company that eventually became the leader of the personal computer market ended, in the middle of a phase of deep restructuring and reinvention of itself, to bring to the market a kind of "anti-PC" or "deconstruction of the PC" For a price of fifty dollars would be an enormously poetic way of justifying the name of the device. Imagine the potential of cost reduction for corporate environments to have consistent jobs simply on a screen with USB connection, a Bluetooth keyboard and a WiFi.

At the moment, little is known of Ophelia more than the press release, a photo next to a glasses for size reference, a quote on Slashdot, and some more articles in International Business Times, Ars Technica or Quartz speculating about the topic. But it seems clear that a reinvented and restructured Dell outside the smartphone business and redefining the post-PC era with such a move could be a radically different company than we know it to be. And potentially, very interesting.

The cloud is not good or bad: providers are

The cloud is not good or bad: providers are

Sidekickoutage The loss of data from all users of the popular Sidekick device offered by T-Mobile is launching many analysts to talk about a loss of confidence in cloud computing and the idea of ​​having the data supposedly safe on a remote server. Sidekick is a service offered by a company whose name can not be more appropriate for the circumstances, Danger, which was acquired by five hundred million dollars by Microsoft in February 2008, acquisition after which suffered a strong personnel leak.

Sidekick data has been since the acquisition of the company hosted in data centers owned by Microsoft. According to existing information, on October 1, 2009, Microsoft outsourced a storage area network (SAN) from its data center to Hitachi, when something went wrong and resulted in a loss of data. The problem became catastrophic when it was found that Microsoft, incomprehensibly, lacked a backup copy of the data, so that, on October 10, after a period of a week's service crash, Warn the several thousand users of Sidekick of the loss of all their data: calendars, contacts, notes, photos and any other information that they did not have at that moment in his terminal. To truly realize the magnitude of the problem, there is simply a glance at some of the stories that users of the service have.

Following the announcement, T-Mobile has stopped offering the Sidekick service, offered a compensation of one hundred dollars to users claiming data losses, allows a unilateral breach of contracts and, although it seems that recently has announced that perhaps not All data is lost, Microsoft is seeing how the five hundred million dollars that was supposed to be worth Danger evaporate forced marches on a weekend.

No, the problem is not in the cloud. I have been working with service providers of all kinds: my photos are on Flickr, my favorites in Delicious, my documents in Google Docs, my emails in Gmail ... I have never had any problems, but instead many advantages derived from it in terms Flexibility, safety and comfort. But in all business activities, and the custody of third-party data is one of them, there are good, bad, and regular providers. There are reliable providers, and others who are not. A service provider of this type must, as a minimum, have a contingency plan that safeguards the users' data of possible problems derived from virtually anything, and that includes, as a minimum-minimum-minimum, having a copy of Security of the same that allows recovery after a problem. Not having it is an absolute irresponsibility, and it is something that should directly rule out a provider: it is more than likely that both Danger and Microsoft's Pink project for which the acquisition was made will disappear because of this.

When things are done as they should be done, the reasonable thing is to think that our data are infinitely more secure housed in a provider that is dedicated to that, than in our house, where we tend to be simply amateurs of security and redundancy. The problem arises when it turns out that the provider you trusted in is as amateur as you and, violating all logic, does not keep a miserable backup of the data. No, the cloud is not a problem. The problem is to trust who is not to handle it.