In the last 3 – 4 years, one of the most common buzz words in the IT industry is “CLOUD”. Most of the IT Software / Hardware / Service / Application providers have been busy setting up their own cloud platforms ( Azure, Office 365, Amazon, Google cloud, Oracle Cloud , Apple, Samsung etc) in order to create their own eco-system to provide better, cheaper and faster services to their customers.
From a SharePoint perspective – Microsoft is pushing us to use Office 365, Azure, Sky Drive and so on, rather than the on-premise platforms that we have all come to love and learn. You only have to look at the stats below to see how the last 2 SharePoint Conferences have played out.
- SharePoint Conference 2011 : There were a total of 18 Cloud Sessions and 219 On-Premise Sessions. (see ‘SPC-2011_Sessions’). That means 7.6% of all sessions were Cloud.
- SharePoint Conference 2012 : There were a total of 106 Cloud Sessions and 164 On-Premise Sessions. (see ‘ SharePoint Conference 2012 Sessions’). That means 39.2% of all sessions were Cloud.
- So from 2011 to 2012 we saw 5 time more Cloud related sessions. When you think that Yammer is now a big part of the stack, 2 guesses how this figure will grow in 2013! In fact I would make a big guess that 60-70% of the sessions will now be related to Cloud.
The big question is – what is this doing to our careers ?
I have personally been working with .Net (and later SharePoint) for the last 14 years. I have also started working with the Windows Azure platform (as a Beginner) for a current client. It’s amazing to see that using Cloud tech (Office 365 and Azure) is not only impacting the IT technical people, but it also drives the business to think about their processes and solution in very different ways.
I am posting my question to the community to get your opinion and here your experiences when working with Office 365 / Azure
- Cloud, Office 365 , Azure – Is it the beginning of the end of the on-premise platform?
- Are you finding ways to re-define your job role and move with the times ?
- What will it do for our jobs (i.e how does it impact the SharePoint Business / Analysts / Developer / Architect / Infrastructure users?)
- Is it cost effective compared to the on-premise solution ? (Azure pretty expensive still).
Being what Microsoft would call an IT Pro, the shift to cloud has significant impact on me but I don’t think the current generation of products is quite there yet and so I’m not jumping ship just yet. People have already alluded to the crude app model and I can second the issues with migration and permissions via external onMicrosoft accounts. Interesting and exciting times are ahead but I don’t think we’re quite there yet.
Hi Venkat,
I prefer Office 365 personally. Please find copied the link which details the difference between the Google Apps vs Office 365.
http://www.microsoft.com/government/en-gb/Documents/Office365_vs_GoogleApps.pdf
We use SharePoint 2010 as a Document management system internally . We also considering the Google docs / apps as it is free and web based. Is there any significant advantage in Office 365 compared to Google apps?
I agree Mark. There will always be positive’s and negatives, always be technical challenges. I think were it will be interesting is in a Hybrid model, and context aware services, to adequately load responsibilities across different locations or in house. It will also force business to think about applications as aggregated transactions rather than systems more so than before. As with any hype-cycle there is still a bit of maturity needed, and some despondency at the moment. Opportunity always comes disguised as hardwork unfortunately. I also think a ubiquitous Cloud API needs much more development and maturity and until AWS, MS, RackSpace et el all baseline to a common interface Cloud savy application developers we will be highly employable. Which will take sometime if achievable at all..
I think in time a lot will move to the cloud. Right now people are concerned with things like the app model, authentication with local accounts etc. You have to remember what it was like when the first cloud email providers came along, hotmail, gmail etc. A lot of people wouldn’t use them as they felt safer with their email nicely downloaded to their computer.
As time goes on the idea of mixing your internal AD, federating it out to the cloud will be absolutely common place and standard. The products like SP2013 and O365 are still very much first release products in a lot of ways.
Looking after your own kit in server rooms and paying people to do it is expensive. Companies will get rid of it and use commodity cloud capability. Concerns around legal jurisdiction, where data is stored etc will also get sorted as laws in various countries eventually catch up with the reality of how the IT world works. It will just take time.
There are so many parts that have to mature together to make it work, the average bandwidth available to devices and networks in general, the performance capability of the cloud hosted environments, the architecture of business solutions to fit new ways of working.
What will not change is that people and businesses have problems to solve. They will still require technical people to build solutions by sticking bits together and solving those problems. The fact the bits live in the cloud makes no difference. You might have to adapt and change your skills slightly but we have always had to do that.
