On-premise, Hosted, or Microsoft Cloud? (Part Two)

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Interest and activities around Office 365 has been accelerating exponentially and so we have gotten somewhat distracted.  Many customers are trying to make sense of the cloud and understand what it can do for their organizations, so it is timely for us to continue this topic from our previous post.

Cloud
Many vendors will try to over-simplify the cloud as something you access through a browser with your data sitting in someone else’s data-center.  For us at Microsoft (field), the cloud is more than simply having your data hosted with us and accessing them through a browser.  This is a very limiting view and reduces this metaphor to a single end-point – the browser and all its current limitations.  Rather, we tend of think of it as:

“An approach to computing that is about internet scale and connecting to a variety of devices and endpoints”

Personally, having been in the technology industry for over 10 years, I find this is where it gets interesting since it is such a paradigm shift for many CIOs and IT professionals.  It is almost like moving back towards the centralized model of mainframe computing, but with a focus on three key benefits – elasticity, agility, and experience.

Quite simply, this is a model where we leverage the large scale and resiliency of the internet to dynamically scale up and down based on your needs.  IT organizations can outsource the day-to-day mundane tasks of operational maintenance to a dedicated staff and be up and running in a matter of days; allowing them to focus on projects that bring true impact to the business.  At the same time, we enable your users to make this paradigm shift with minimal impact on their productivity experience – they can choose how they want to consume the cloud, whether this is through their traditional tools (e.g. Microsoft Office), natively on their mobile devices (e.g. BlackBerries, ActiveSync devices), or through their favourite browser.  They are able to do all this without having to change their current workflows or install any third party add-ons.  This is especially important in this age of consumerization of IT where we can seeing an increase mixture of both personal and IT-sanctioned devices in the enterprise.

From a technologist’s perspective, I often say that it can be summarized into three value propositions at a high-level: 

  • New Economics (Reduced Infrastructure Costs)

    • You only pay for what you use when you need it since the cost is based on per user per month subscription – this removes the need for many IT organizations to bring up a large scale infrastructure and purchase licenses when they only need this capacity for parts of the year (seasonal).
    • The flexibility of the cloud enables you to service users that may not have been economically feasible in the past (e.g. task workers), combined with easy asset management for high turn-over rates and charge-back accounting.

  • Reduced Management (Reduced Operational Costs)

    • You no longer need to worry about “Patch Tuesdays” or budgeting for a large upgrade every three years, since this is all inclusive of the subscription cost and covered by our dedicated team of Global Foundation Services engineers available 24x7.
    • Since the solution is already up and running, there is no wait time for your hardware vendor or hosting partner to acquire the hardware, and then configure the necessary software which results in faster deployments.

  • Increase Productivity (Reduced Productivity Costs)

    • Your organization and end-users benefit from the latest and greatest capabilities through a controlled change management process - one that is well-documented and personalized to your organization, and clearly indicated through a service future roadmap so that you remain in control at all times.
    • Since the cloud can be accessed anywhere and anytime, this means that IT can allow end-users to access their data from both business-provided and personal devices to further  contribute to your organization’s competitive advantage and employee satisfaction.

Just like the personal computer and Internet before it, I would dare say that the cloud is quickly becoming a notable change in how we compute – both for the consumer, end-user, and IT professionals alike.  Follow us as we continue to explore this interesting model with the upcoming launch of Office 365!