IT Consumerization: The end of IT is nigh | Hacker News Reader

IT Consumerization: The end of IT is nigh

blog.cloudability.com

19 pointsakaffen26 comments

The cloudpocalypse is nigh! Here's a handy guide for surviving the end times.

I would love to be dis-intermediated, but everytime I've tried committing to "cloud" technology (and other innovations) I've loved it and the people I work with have hated it. Here's a list of things people don't get:

1. Cloud-based backup. It's insecure, bound to be hacked - never mind the encryption, teh haxxors can get around that stuff! So we're back to tapes and DVDs before you know it.

2. Virtual machines, but only if I make the mistake of telling them. It gives some people the willies for the same reason as (1) above, plus the supposed problems of a "shared" server. Also, if a server is outside our firewall they think it's less secure.

3. Google mail. They prefer Exchange for reasons which remain a mystery to me. I hate Exchange, love Google Mail and everything that comes with it. Even using Gmail via Outlook is mysteriously deficient for my colleagues.

4. Google Docs. Being able to collaborate on-line is not a very big benefit. The familiarity of MS Office is.

Things which do work:

1. iPads. This is the machine which will put me, an IT tech, out of work. Hasten the day.

2. Dropbox. Simple paradigm and works with the iPad.

3. All the clunky, difficult-to-manage, badly-designed software they've been using for years and have come to love in all their ugliness. It makes me weep.

The thing which will change this is the arrival of younger, more IT-literate people in the workplace. I have no problems at all with the under-30s; all the problems in the world with people older than that (not all of them but enough to be a permanent drag on progress). The simple fact is that these people will even shy away from something as superb as MailChimp's or Google's admin interfaces: too many buttons! They always get me to do it for them, and I will have a job in IT for as long as I want it.

If only they knew that Dropbox is cloud storage. It's Amazon S3 via python, the rsync library and a familar icon.

I never said they had logic on their side ;) I suppose basically I'm saying you need to make it super-braindead-simple or it won't work. Dropbox and the iPad both do that (I mean it in a good way). I personally don't like the iPad I have at work but non-techies really love them. Small children, older people, no problem. They've discovered Dropbox more-or-less by themselves.

I have wondered how people discover Dropbox. It seems to have penetration into the realm of non-techies, but I am not sure. Is this true, in your opinion?

The iPad I completely understand the appeal. It does not look like a computer. It looks like an Etch-a-Sketch. It's basically a handheld game.

I would love to read more about what your users want. It is interesting and educational.

I work in education so it's a mixed bag. Children like computers for youtube, facebook, etc. They have no inhibitions about technology and don't think it's OK to be clueless. The staff I work with divide into those who use computers all day, every day, and those who only do it occasionally and reluctantly. They tend to take up undue amounts of my time asking for support with trivial things, and I have on occasion been shouted at, whined at by email, screamed at from a distance of a couple of feet, and emotionally blackmailed by a teacher who would break down into tears if I didn't fix her problems immediately. But all the people who do stuff like that (i.e. show extreme discomfort with technology and take it out in inappropriate ways) just love iPads and iPhones. It takes all the crap out of the situation, and it (perhaps most importantly) takes me out of it - I think they feel less dependent when they can install their own apps, etc. The things I dislike about the iPad are what they like most.

I think they discover Dropbox via the iPad rather than via the PC. I don't tell them about it because it can be a bit confusing explaining how it works. But there is no confusion if they find out (for themselves) that it syncs their iPad to their PC and vice versa. Solves a very immediate problem in a hassle-free way.

I'm sure there are plenty of problems waiting to be solved in eduation. For example, multiple logins - to Moodle, Google Docs/Gmail, various other websites. Would love to see an app which sits in the tray and aggregates all these logins so a student can click to say "log me into everything" without ever typing a password except to get into Windows in the first place. (There's not much of a security issue with keeping all these logins in a central database since it's not that sort of login; just a way to play educational games or whatever.) Other things would include ways to get iPads out of the classroom. For example, some of our staff use them to film/photograph students playing sports so they can check their posture. For cricket, for example, it can be very difficult to prove to someone that their arm is bent at the point of delivery (which is a "no ball"). The iPad removes all and any doubt by showing the bowler a movie of his "action". Also, field science, etc - counting how many bugs are in a square meter of grassy ground, using image recognition to look up insects in a DB and say "That's a wood wasp" with a link to Wikipedia, etc.

You did ask ;) I'm sure you could find hundreds of things to do if you're looking for a project.

As to 1: it is in many ways insecure (though bound to be hacked might be a bit much.) While dropbox isn't technically a cloud based backup, it can be used that way and there was a period where a glitch left it totally exposed for about four hours ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)#Reception ). I actually love cloud based backup, but I encrypt my files before I send them and I am dealing with just my own personal data. A company with data they must legally protect would need to be wary.

As to 3: Personally, I love gmail. But from a corporate perspective, you can still exert more control over exchange. This can be significant, especially for highly regulated businesses that need to worry about frequent e-discovery and may perhaps wish to take steps to limit what is sent.

There's a nugget of truth in their concerns which makes them harder to dismiss. Equally, can you say that local storage is more secure, tapes in a "fire-proof" safe, etc? I have reservations about the cloud (Amazon's outage was a wake-up moment for me) but nothing's perfect.

As for Google Mail vs Exchange, my personal opinion is that Gmail is superior in evey way. If you need discovery, you can always shove email through your own gateway (running Postfix) and set it to store all emails it sends and receives. You could also use Postini which I think gives extra facilities like discovery. Might be a bit hacky for some organisations I suppose but I've never found Exchange that elegant or easy to manage.

Thank goodness.

If I can help it I'd like to only work at companies which don't have:

- An IT Department

- An Exchange Server

- A sales team

In my experience, all have been a vicious waste of energy.

How do you propose the said companies make sales without a sales team. (Not to be snarky, maybe I am missing something.)

In my (limited) experience sales people exist to convince people that products have value. This is mostly useful when the people purchasing the products are incapable of evaluating them (see: "enterprise sales"), or when the products don't have enough value to sell themselves. Look around you. How many of the things that you've bought have been sold to you by sales people?

The concept used to have more merit. Lots of things our parents bought were sold to them by salespeople. Most of those same things you and I have purchased without.

Today most of the time I see a salesperson, I see a smokescreen for a shitty product.

A salesperson gets your product in the door. Without that, any potential customers don't know, or care what you are selling, no matter how great you think it is.

This is true if you are unfortunate enough to be operating in a large market with little or no name recognition. The shop I work for quietly sits back and waits for potential clients to contact us. Our client referrals are strong enough to keep our project pipeline running at full capacity year-round.

Sure. I just want to be forced to build products so good that my users do that job.

I think the issue with this lies primarily in young B2B companies/products, especially ones with a large frictional cost in switching over.

Totally... but remember that I didn't say that no company ought to have a sales team, I just said I don't want to work anywhere that does. Filtering out B2B companies with products that have frictional switching costs is exactly the purpose of having that kind of a litmus test.

Cloud and IT are not mutually exclusive. The roles they provide are so different I can't at all see why anyone bothers to makes this apples and oranges argument.

Spot on, this whole argument seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what IT does.

A large part of what IT departments currently do will, eventually, be replaced by cloud-based services that are easily managed. When you hire Google Apps, a lot of your server management disappears. When you put your servers on EC2, you no longer need to manage the boxes they run on.

Things like custom app development, account management and things like that will remain.

I find it interesting that nobody's seems to recognize the primary problem with relying on cloud services - putting the entire business in the hands of your ISP. You can get redundant pipes, but then you're looking at the beginning of way more overhead than the cloud DB sales team wants you to know about.

At my office if the WAN pipe goes down, I know production will still be happening and almost all internal processes will be unaffected. These cloud services will probably soon replace IT for small businesses that in reality don't actually rely on software, but for major businesses where severe downtime = doom the only option is locally hosted services.

Frankly I think this along with the rest the "end of IT" bandwagon are spreading uninformed FUD... The industry will of course adapt to new technology, but IT is unique in its inability to ever be completely displaced by technology.

I agree with you.

But, honestly, the same thing can also be said of electricity (or water/national defence/public transport/roads/sewerage/etc.).

You lean on your provider completely just to keep you running, and even a slight dip in their performance can take down your entire cluster, and completely ruin your day/calculation/work flow (outside of temporary UPS).

Not everyone needs their own generator tammer :D.

  Different strokes for different folks!

Precisely. Not necessary for every business, but entirely necessary any business that can't risk that kind of downtime. We've got (bare minimum) 8Kva UPS's on every netshelter on campus. The production side uses enormous generators and UPS's that I'd like to know more about.

All I mean to say is IT is far from dead, especially in these types of situations.

I think it's worth pointing out that we're facing the end of IT as we know it. I think that the only difference the "cloud revolution" will have is meaning that IT staff will work for some cloud provider rather than the companies themselves.

Perfect! This repairs the relationship because it means these people will be responsible for _producing value_. In most organizations this is a cost center designed (whether consciously or not) to produce friction in the name of safety.

There's probably a TSA-privatization analogy here somewhere.

Nothing like an impartial source for an opinion. Worthless prattle.

If blog posts had theme songs, this one's would be by REM.

I believe the gist of the article is about how IT has always been (and is always going to be) data-centric as opposed to solution-centric, and the guy who understands how to process one petabyte in one nanosecond has a better chance of surviving the consumerization of IT than the guy who does it in 5 nanoseconds (metaphorically speaking).

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