[LINK] Look to the clouds not the slates
Tom Worthington
tom.worthington at tomw.net.au
Sun Dec 19 11:55:04 AEDT 2010
According to media reports, Microsoft is to show Windows based slate
(tablet) computers at the Consumer Electronics Show in January:
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/8201171/Microsoft-to-unveil-new-slates-and-Windows-8-preview-at-CES.html>.
I suggest not getting too excited by this. Microsoft have a long way to
go to catch up to Apple with mobile devices. The Apple iPhone dominates
the upper end of the smart phone market and Google Android the budget
end. I expect the same will happen with tablets. Google are maturing
their Android system for tablets.
In corporate terms what is happening with "Cloud" computing is perhaps
more interesting than tablet computers. If you are using web based cloud
hosted applications, be they from Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com, or
someone else, then you don't need much more than a web browser in your
desktop computers or tablets. It does not matter much what operating
system is used on the client device as long as it has a web browser to
access the corporate application in the cloud. You can then use the same
corporate applications on smart phones, tablet computers, netbooks,
laptops and desktop computers. You need not worry about the
compatibility of your corporate applications running on all these
devices nor arranging long term retention of data on them.
There are some news reports of the SA government considering cloud
computing, after the success of some of the SA education sector's
success with using a Microsoft hosted service:
<http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/371731/south_australia_makes_moves_public_cloud/>.
Ian Foster from Argonne National Laboratory talked at ANU on using
software as a service for large scale scientific computing recently:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/12/software-as-service-for-science.html>.
In my view using cloud computing for corporate services is a very high
risk strategy, as it can result in loss of control of data. APRA has
warned the banks about this:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/11/banks-warned-about-cloud-computing.html>.
A better approach is that suggested by Yusuf J. Mansuri, First Assistant
Secretary, ICT Strategic & Corporate Services Division, Department of
Human Services at "Cloud Computing Conference and Expo 2010" in Sydney
in September, where he hinted at an Australian Government Cloud
Computing Centre:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/09/australian-government-cloud-computing.html>
The idea would be to have a shared facility on Australian territory, so
it is subject to Australian law and shared by organisations with
compatible procedures and aims.
Universities would similarly be a group with common aims who could use a
joint facility. We have more than enough technology to allow secure
sharing of such facilities. The issue is if we have governance and
financial structures up to the challenge. Previous attempts at shared IT
services between universities have mostly failed as they depended on
sharing development of new bespoke software. Sharing a data centre and
hardware is much simpler. One obvious way would be to contract the
service out to the private sector. But another would be to use a
non-profit organisation like the National Computational Infrastructure
<http://nf.nci.org.au/> and AARnet
<http://www.aarnet.edu.au/about-us/history.aspx>.
Apart from saving organisations a lot of money (and CIOs a lot of
worry), this central service approach will also save a lot of electrical
energy and therefore carbon emissions.
However there are a lot of corporate issues to resolve in sharing a
hosted computer system. One easy approach is to outsource the provision
of a specific service which is hosted remotely. An example of this is
when a educational institution changes to a new Learning Management
System (LMS). Because the LMS provides a relatively self-contained set
of services and uses a web interface, it can be easily provided by an
external hosting service. The university just needs to provide a network
for desktop and mobile web clients to access the remote service. They do
not need to run a a money and energy hungry server, or maintain
educational software on the clients. There are companies which
specialise in providing LMS hosting. This allows the company to optimise
their computer system to run just one type of software for multiple
clients. Both ANU
<http://information.anu.edu.au/daisy/infoservices/1802.html> and
University of Canberra
<http://www.canberra.edu.au/tlc/lms-renewal-project/lms-renewal-project>
converted from an internal Web CT to externally hosted Moodle service.
The same can be done for accounting, CRM and other software services.
Blog post n this:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/12/look-to-clouds-not-slates.html>.
--
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra
More information about the Link
mailing list