Many technology consultants, including myself, predict that 2011 will be the year that outsourced networking resources – “cloud computing” being the popular name – will come into the mainstream. Over the years, the concept has had many names: Application Service Providers (ASP) and Software as a Service (SaaS) were two of the more recent names coined for the concept of locating your application software – if not your data itself – on some server farm located “somewhere on the planet.”
To date, technical sophistication limited many companies from looking at cloud technologies. The cheap/affordable public systems, such as Google Apps, tend to lack many of the features to which business and large-entity users are accustomed. On the other end, successful custom platforms – such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Microsoft’s Azure environment – require fairly high-end technical knowledge for many organizations to configure and connect to their conventional systems. And through all of this, we bean-counters have said “I’m not going to trust *my* accounting and other privileged data to some system outside of my control.”
But that’s changing, and quite quickly at that.
In my eyes, the first significant development is the (US 2002) Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). This act lays out the base-line information technology/security (IT/IS) requirements of any network that is to support sensitive information – surprisingly, the tenets of this Act are not that conceptually different than the goals of COBIT or the Payment Card Industry (PCI) doctrines. Yet, FISMA is the minimum standard security/technical certification framework for which *any* US Federal government data system must comply; specifically, for the protection of privileged information. For the accounting community, FISMA means that the concerns about data protection are met.
The second significant development – to me at least – is Microsoft’s new Office 365 product. Just entering “beta” stage as of this past April, Office 365 is a re-vamp of Microsoft’s cloud-based Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), encompassing Microsoft’s top network infrastructure tools: MS Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync (nee Office Communicator Server). The difference is that all of these have a “dumbed down” interface for all of us who are not network server engineers and – you guessed it – all of this infrastructure is up and running in a cloud environment.
Nota Bene: Office 365 does *not* include the popular MS-Office suite of desktop products – no Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook – rather, Office 365 is the infrastructure that takes data from the desktop tools and connects it up with all of your users (wherever they may be).
At the time of writing, this new MS Office 365 hasn’t exactly obtained FISMA certification yet but, it’s expected that it will by summer time (or shortly thereafter). When that happens, a very interesting dynamic will be in place:
- Easy access to cloud computing for the masses – you just sign up for it right from the Microsoft home page
- You can use your familiar applications on your desktop but have your people connected via cloud (for Exchange servers like calendars, email and Lync services such as text chat, audio/video conferencing, whiteboarding, desktop-sharing, and presence tracking via MS-Outlook). You can work together on your common Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, except that you would now store them in the SharePoint components to let it coordinate the collaboration.
- Rich features that users already know how to use (unlike “work-in-progress” of Google Apps)
- Enhanced collaboration capabilities compared to your local network systems (“modify/track changes” on steroids)
- Access to your data from anywhere
- Access your data/files on ANY DEVICE – cell phone, PC, iPad, Android phone, BlackBerry – as long as you have a data plan and can tap into the Internet at your location.
- No need to invest in large file servers, storage drives, backup tapes, etc. – Microsoft will be worrying about all of that for you
- Still worried about the privacy and confidentiality aspects of your data? Remember that once the service is FISMA-certified, all of those concerns are out the window. If it passes FISMA, chances are that the system will be far more secure than your own systems could ever be – especially if you’re a small/mid-sized organization.
- Cost: US$ 7/month per user to small organizations (as of April during the beta test period). If you need licences for MS Office 2007/2010 for your users, add about $25/month/user to that figure (volume discounts, apparently, will apply)
This move by Microsoft will do wonders to entice people over to the cloud experience. Up until this point, Microsoft largely was criticized for its weak cloud offerings. Not to say that it didn’t have a feasible cloud environment (Azure) but, it was an environment that required higher-end technical knowledge to use. Office 365 really changes that in a meaningful way: Now, small/mid-sized organizations could easily make use of the cloud environment. However to get the most benefit from the system, organizations may need to get their SharePoint Server knowledge up to speed.
I do expect that Google (and others) will be racing to catch up
