Tag Archives: Laptop

Cloud Computing Has Killed The PC

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It looks like the end for the PC. Unlike the Dinosaurs the PC will not just vanish from the face of the Earth – they will just stop being replaced and gradually die out to be spotted on the desks of die-hard antiquarians and IT folk who like to tinker with the insides of anything that can be opened.

I can even date when this process began. It was the day, the 18th August to be precise, when HP announced it had bought UK software firm Autonomy for £7.1bn then added, almost as an afterthought that it was considering selling its personal systems group, which includes the world’s biggest PC-making business, and that it will discontinue its webOS devices.

HP has some very complex problems to solve and they have gone through some bad times but this decision is about more than surviving bad times and facing the commoditisation of the PC squarely in the face.

It’s about realising that the major choice a consumer or a corporate has now is not about hardware. The days when buying the correct IT infrastructure are now long gone – today it’s about recognising the realities of mobile computing.

Mobile computing isn’t about providing your staff with the best laptop, smartphone and tablet to keep them productive on the road – the hardware is now so reliable that the choice is often left to the users – something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

How on Earth would they be able to choose the most reliable laptop? Now a consumer can walk into any retail park and buy a tablet computer with no moving parts that will last until it is lost or discarded.

Many young people are doing much of their computing on their smartphones where the choice of hardware is, once again, almost irrelevant. Young people live their lives on the move from home to school to University to work and they want devices they don’t have to pack into a car to lug around.

They also use the Cloud instinctively – what is iTunes but a Cloud providing music. The popularity of web mail means few youngsters have ever configured a Microsoft Outlook client.

The only thing stopping most businesses moving to tablets is purely to do with their culture and environments. We are heading for devices that will run almost exclusively over the internet. I am writing this piece on a tablet connected to the internet using my virtual desktop. I don’t even know where my old laptop is now.

Most people are now happy to use email banking and other services via browser and while it took some time for people to become comfortable with banking online they have taken to it eventually as they discover it is safe. What we are seeing is the rapid expansion of available services with more traditional pcs being replaced by the tablet form and laptops taking over the arena of the PC.

Most users will be happy with a screen and internet access, and the ability to buy or use applications that provide the services they need, without the need for bulky operating systems.

The benefits of Cloud Computing for businesses are now so compelling that any new business setting up would be very unlikely to provide its employees the internal IT infrastructure that was typical only a few years ago.

Why force upon yourself the overheads of PCs which have a cost of ownership, need repairs often because of the number of moving parts and a full-time staff to keep them up to date and running? No business person would do it unless they had compelling reasons.

The Cloud is greener. Cloud data centres use virtualisation which cuts down the number of servers needed and the power consumption goes down because new servers don’t even have fans inside them. HP is merely following example set by IBM when it dropped out of the hardware market to concentrate on services.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft and the other PC-centric vendors adapt to the new world of the Cloud. For the moment the consumer (user) is in control, something the old PC departments of corporates fought fiercely against. But like the Dinosaurs they lost the battle.

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Why Your Next Desktop Will Be Virtual

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There will always be a need for conventional desktops and notebooks for specific users, but desktop virtualization has matured today. In fact, it’s time to take a hard look, not just a passing glance, at what it can provide.

The magic that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can provide is in taking a fairly inexpensive thin-client device, giving it access to your data center from anywhere, and allowing that device to take on the image of a typical desktop. VDI provides the device with all the data and applications you need throughout your day, and then reverts to the proverbial tabula rasa when you shut it down. Because no data is stored on the device, you never have to worry about proprietary data falling into the wrong hands if the device itself—desktop, laptop or tablet—is lost or stolen.

VDI should change the way you think about the desktop. For your users who fit the bill, there are significant reasons why VDI makes sense right now.

Five reasons to examine VDI now

Reason No. 1: Hard cost savings

Thin clients cost less and they last longer (six to seven years versus four years for a notebook). They also consume a fraction of the energy of a desktop PC (as low as six to seven watts for thin clients versus 150 watts for PCs).

Reason No. 2: Ease of management

Thin clients are easier to patch and upgrade. They have slower generational changes than PCs so you’re not swapping out newer versions all the time.

Reason No. 3: Centralized backups

When using virtual desktops, everything is backed up centrally, which is easier on data center operations and eliminates local drive issues. This makes sense for tablets as well since they are not a traditional client device and their backups most certainly are not handled by most enterprise backup applications.

Reason No. 4: Regulatory compliance

Since all the data and applications are centralized, VDI makes it vastly easier to enable and enforce processes and procedures to ensure security, privacy and other best practices.

Reason No. 5: Productivity gains

VDI encourages telecommuting or remote working, which can contribute to higher productivity, better morale and lower office space expenses while decreasing demands on help desks. If there are problems, it’s easier to troubleshoot standard images and integrate applications with standard hardware. Plus, users need less training with standard images.

While these reasons to examine VDI now are substantial and worth considering, VDI isn’t for everyone—at least not yet. To be successful, you need to be very selective with the users you choose to bring into the VDI model. But for those users that can take advantage of VDI, the benefits they reap may feel a bit like magic.

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Cloud Computing Can Lessen Dependence On a Single Device

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Diane Darling flies around the country, speaking on “Effective Networking” – not coincidentally her company’s name.

But this column isn’t about her networking tips.

This is about Darling’s born-of-experience advice to entrepreneurs whose laptops hold their work. And it’s particularly about those who schlep their laptops from place to place.

At a recent speaking engagement, Darling returned to the car – where her laptop had been hidden under the car seat – and found the car broken into and the laptop stolen.

On that laptop were her slide presentations, a book draft and her Outlook e-mail files.

For many sole practitioners, a theft like that could have been disastrous. For Darling, it was a massive inconvenience, but survivable.

“Good news is that I use a fair amount of ‘cloud’ computing,” Darling wrote in an e-mail to business contacts.

She stores most of her crucial information on “cloud” computer servers that back up her files.

Darling uses Dropbox, a cloud server she migrated to after testing another online system. She says Mozy and Carbonite are options.

She’s also investigating e-mail alternatives to Outlook (such as Gmail or Yahoo) to store her contact lists other than just on her personal computer.

And she’s a big fan of Google’s calendar function that syncs with her BlackBerry, as well as EverNote.com, a tool that syncs her notes between computer and phone.

Darling isn’t afraid of technology – a barrier to many entrepreneurs who are groping through the cyberspace world. Her message is that it’s not that scary.

Jump in! You must have backups. And that can include a backup external hard drive on your home computer.

Darling has decided to gravitate toward a tablet computer, such as an iPad, to make the hardware more portable.

“Keep your laptop at home and your tablet with you,” she suggests. “You need something smaller than a laptop but bigger than a phone.”

And don’t get comfortable with one solution for long.

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Microsoft Cloud Computing Predictions

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Many companies may have e-mail, virus scanning or CRM running as a service over the internet, but most organizations are only just starting out when it comes to cloud computing, according to Microsoft.

The software giant’s lists ways the nascent cloud market will change in the next few years.

Cloud-centric hardware

Servers, microprocessors and client devices will evolve as purpose-built systems to address the new paradigm of cloud computing. For example, diskless laptops that store data in the cloud could be used as an alternative to fully-fledged laptops, while server and storage companies revamp their offerings.

Partnering in the cloud

Traditional web hosting companies are likely to start wholesaling and then reselling cloud services from the global players as a way of building their businesses without building out physical infrastructure. Service providers, resellers or other agents will deal with multiple cloud providers, acting as central points for single sign-on, customer care and billing.

Benchmarking

Measuring cloud performance will be difficult because of the complexity wrought by multitenant infrastructures, but metrics will emerge to identify and resolve issues that effect speed and provide ways to assess how well cloud services are running.

Platform-as-a-service

While the main benefit of cloud migration currently tends to focus on cost savings, the long-term advantages in discovering the possibilities of applying infinite computing resources to meet enterprise challenges. Such scenarios are best made possible with Platform as a service (PaaS) models, a cloud-based platform for development and deployment of application software.

Systems management tools

The consoles familiar from enterprise IT will evolve to provide views of multi-mode IT operations where, for example, some assets are maintained behind the firewall while the cloud is used for “burst-mode” activities such as running a complex business intelligence query. IT will need to enable this through management and middleware tools.

Best practices

As organizations get to grips with cloud computing examples of governance, security, budgeting, testing and provisioning will emerge.

Standards and interoperability

As customers begin to seriously look at public or hosted clouds for business critical workloads, their requirements will go beyond data sovereignty. They will look for assurance that the suppliers have scale, stability and commitment to standards and will want switch suppliers without having to rewrite applications or reconstitute data. They will also want to switch workloads from an on-premise private cloud or traditional infrastructure to public cloud in an efficient, cost-effective way.

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