IT Desktop Support To Be Wiped Out Thanks To Cloud Computing

An anonymous reader writes "Tech industry experts are saying that desktop support jobs will be declining sharply thanks to cloud computing. Why is this happening? A large majority of companies and government agencies will rely on the cloud for more than half of their IT services by 2020, according to Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda Survey."

Comments

Survey?

[Hsien-Ko]

The naivety into a fud survey disturbs me, not to mention the whole company dependence issue which could lead into a business trap backlash if one fails.

Cloud computing isn't going to kill anything.

Re:Survey?

[Mitchell314]

To be fair, hype overload is killing brain cells.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

agree. I run a service desk. Cloud computing doesn't eliminate the morons using computers. Cloud computing won't change a thing except provide new challengers to my tier 1 techs.

Re:Survey?

[History's Coming To]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

Re:Survey?

[CSMoran]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

The dumber the terminal, the fewer hardware faults, OS problems and malware, no?
Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :).

Re:Survey?

[MitchDev]

"Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :)." Does IQ measurement go below zero?

Re:Survey?

[hairyfeet]

The sad part is nobody seems to remember we have been down this road before....show of hands, anybody remember the whole "thin client push" in the dot bomb days? I sure do, you had all these companies pushing "the net/server' would solve everything, all your IT needs and problems just poof! Gone. anybody else remember that? So what happened?

The exact same things that is gonna happen this time, worries about data security, having a whole office sitting on ass if the network ever goes down, lag and crappy hosted apps not being as good as rich desktop apps, which BTW none of these problems have been solved by replacing net or server with cloud. I guess history doomed repeat and all that.

Re:Survey?

[kelemvor4]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

The dumber the terminal, the fewer hardware faults, OS problems and malware, no? Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :).

At some point it's got to to run an OS, maybe on a backend server instead of a workstation but it's there. Where there's an OS and users, there will be malware. The hardware faults will transfer to "server" instead of the workstation. An interesting change will be that a hardware fault that takes down the box will impact multiple users instead of just one. You will get the benefit of redundancy if you're running a real server, though.

As an aside, we had cloud computing in the 80's and 90's. We called it Client-Server and used terminals connected to unix servers (in my case specifically, HP-UX). Now we're doing the same thing, just with different hardware and software.

Re:Survey?

[unixisc]

The naivety into a fud survey disturbs me, not to mention the whole company dependence issue which could lead into a business trap backlash if one fails. Cloud computing isn't going to kill anything.

Quite agree. How exactly will people access the cloud? They won't be having the cloud itself - they'll need laptops and tablets to access it. Like those things won't need support? Even if support was to come from the cloud, that's only valid when internet connectivity is fully functional (not always the case) or there is nothing physically wrong w/ the part. But for those 2 key cases, IT support will always be needed. Maybe less frequently, but no way will it go the way of the dodo.

Re:Survey?

[kelemvor4]

The sad part is nobody seems to remember we have been down this road before....show of hands, anybody remember the whole "thin client push" in the dot bomb days? I sure do, you had all these companies pushing "the net/server' would solve everything, all your IT needs and problems just poof! Gone. anybody else remember that? So what happened?

The exact same things that is gonna happen this time, worries about data security, having a whole office sitting on ass if the network ever goes down, lag and crappy hosted apps not being as good as rich desktop apps, which BTW none of these problems have been solved by replacing net or server with cloud. I guess history doomed repeat and all that.

Yep, and long before that we had unix terminals connected to a central host. "Cloud computing" will hit the enterprise, and in a few years the enterprise will move on to something else.

Re:Survey?

[ongelovigehond]

Average and standard deviation are fixed by definition, so the IQ distribution will stay the same. In theory, you can already go below 0.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So what happened?"

People realized that using Windows as a thin client is as useless as a diamond tipped cutter for cheese.

Re:Survey?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While I expect that the data security/control concerns and UX deficiencies will be(if anything) worse with served-from-offsite-across-a-WAN-by-who-knows-who 'cloud' stuff than they were with served-from-our-datacenter-over-the-network-by-IT thin client stuff, it does seem likely to me that the impact on local IT staff will be different.

In my rather painful experiences with thin clients, the client hardware itself is practically bulletproof; but the terminal servers are more than touchy enough to make up for it. Each one combines the worst aspects of managing a desktop and a server and the whole exercise largely ends up saving you a modest amount of money on clients that you spend on server gear instead.

With 'cloud', however, the care and feeding of the application server is(at least in theory) also abstracted for you. User plugs in URL, user receives email. This generation often doesn't feature particularly 'thin' client hardware, running a contemporary web browser is far more intense than running an X11/RDP/ICA client; but you hide much more of the server complexity behind the vendor.

Re:Survey?

[SuricouRaven]

Having really dumb terminals does simplify end support though. Computer not working? Pull it out, put in a new one. Send the old one back to the manufacturer. It means one IT worker can support many more computers, and needs less training thus lower pay. This is very good from a business perspective, but very bad for job satisfaction. Telecoms went through something like that when the old click-and-bang mechanical switches were replaced with solid state boards that were just swapped out, thus reducing highly skilled engineers to the role of 'pull anything with the fault light lit and stick in a new one.' A lot of them retired early.

Re:Survey?

[c]

> The sad part is nobody seems to remember we have been down this road before....

Yup. I see "cloud" and I immediately think "client-server". Well, "client-virtual server hosted on some random network somewhere in a collection of physical servers", but whatever.

You can shuffle stuff between the client space and server space all you want, but 90% of day-to-day problems will still be found between the keyboard and the chair.

Re:Survey?

[White Flame]

Not to mention deploying OS updates, new versions of client-side software for their cloud-hosted services, and fielding all the troubleshooting that comes from that.

Re:Survey?

[El Torico]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Re:Survey?

[Grimbleton]

You don't say.

Re:Survey?

[lightknight]

Surprisingly often, if past incidents are anything to go by.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

THere's a book on it
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2012/03/22/our-new-book-quot-the-vdi-delusion-quot-is-now-available-for-download.aspx

Re:Survey?

[El Torico]

...a diamond tipped cutter for cheese.

That may be handy for a block of 25 year old Parmigiano-Reggiano. Then again, I already have a chain saw, so I might try that instead.

Re:Survey?

[Joce640k]

Yep, and it will stop the entire company from working when it happens.

Managers will start to think that individual PCs will prevent that...and we'll begin the circle of computing all over again. Just like the last time.

Re:Survey?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Having really dumb terminals does simplify end support though. Computer not working? Pull it out, put in a new one. Send the old one back to the manufacturer. It means one IT worker can support many more computers, and needs less training thus lower pay.

Only if you've divided up your roles... But so many companies have people "wearing many hats" that, in practice, it will be the same person doing the virtualization AND the "desktop" support of the virtual-desktops... Which means he'll need far MORE training than current helpdesk people. In fact, what it really does is makes IT hiring that much harder for most organizations because now you can't just hire somebody who knows Windows desktops for the helpdesk/workstation VM admin role--you would need to hire somebody who knows VDI or Xen Desktop (or something else.)

Re:Survey?

[paiute]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Which reminds me - I really haven't heard the kind of marketing/meme support for this new cloud thing. I mean startup named Cumulonimbus or Translucidus or bending to the new task old metaphors like silver linings, etc.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Do you not read any tech news at all?

There has been current and major failures with all the cloud services. Microsoft's most recently, and it was for more than a few minutes.

Are you confusing the "cloud" with the "internet?"

And....when this happens, you have ZERO control over resolving the issue, you sit and wait.

Re:Survey?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Where are these dumb terminals? Off the shelf PCs are standard in businesses everywhere; swapping them out might not be practical for a large organisation as they might not have enough spares on hand for more than a few failures. That happened a few times back in Nortel.

Re:Survey?

[lightknight]

I see cloud, and think of mainframes.

If the mainframe goes down, all the dumb terminals are useless, and any work is lost. Specially written software that only runs on a handful of computers of the same type, and cost overruns that makes even the most outrageous licensing deals from Oracle and MS look like blue-light specials.

Not that mainframes weren't fun, or powerful, in their heyday. But there is a major reason the PC took off.

But the best part of all of this is that I get to sit back, with a box of popcorn and a large drink, and watch an entire generation of marketing / companies built around clouds commit seppuku, for free. You can't pay money for this kind of satisfaction.

And someone will have to explain to me why any sane company would want to outsource the in-house IT. I am somewhat biased, but of all the places you could start with slashing the costs thereof, you start with the one that most executives understand the least about...I suppose they've never had the wonderous experience of "if you don't know what it does, don't touch it."

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

This was one of the early arguments for Unix/Linux.

Windows because it offers the possibility of a rich client has: complex breakable hardware, which is unique to the user, a complex OS and applications susceptible to malware. A thin client erases all those issues. The hardware itself is far less breakable, and isn't unique to the user. You can just have spares and have them fixed "whenever". The OS just has to boot the hardware and connect to the servers, and the applications all exist remotely. Think about your television as the hardware, the cable box as the OS and the shows as being applications. The TV rarely breaks and when it does it can replaced with another generic television.

Now .... you are replacing your desktop team with a more complex system admin and operations team because the local system But right now, as a legacy of Windows, most companies have both complex server solutions and complex desktop solutions.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

In terms of malware, Windows created a computer monoculture for the enterprise desktops. Servers have more diversity than desktops. You might see a large drop off in malware.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Sure this cycle has been repeated since the 1960s.

1) There are real advantages to centralization for some applications
2) There are real advantages to distributed for some applications
3) There are substantial additional costs in being both distributed and centralized

3 encourages people to move towards one extreme or the other. The conflict between 1 and 2 pushes the back towards the center.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Terminal servers were a terrible idea. Take desktop thick client apps and deploy them remotely. That makes no sense at all. You get the disadvantages of thick client hardware, the disadvantages of tremendously expensive servers. OTOH because the apps aren't distributed you don't get the advantages in versatility of thick client. The worst of all worlds.

In the browser based solution, the goal is not to save money on client hardware. You can't, because browser apps are something like 100x more CPU intensive than local applications you might very well up your client costs. The goal though is the clients are fully generic. Any and all sufficiently powerful computers can run the remote app without any additional support. That allows for work from home culture, which saves you on real estate.

Re:Survey?

[Kjella]

Same with a lot of computer and electronics repair, in the old days they actually repaired them like replacing a bad chip or capacitor or welded a bad connection. Then they were replacing whole cards instead of components and eventually mostly replaced the whole box. They went from highly skilled jobs to simple manual labor to glorified delivery boys. It doesn't even matter if they are repairable, it just isn't worth a skilled person's time to look at cheap, small electronics anymore. Even warranty repairs are becoming more and more warranty replacements, it's not worth it to fix one item compared to increasing the capacity of the production line to produce some replacements.

Re:Survey?

[jimicus]

Funny, I seem to remember a similar idea - about how dumb terminals were going to take over the world - back in, ooh, about 1998, 1999. Have we really gone full-circle already?

Re:Survey?

[JazzHarper]

Indeed. Stupidity is bottomless. You can get dizzy gazing into it.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Thanks for the tip!

Re:Survey?

[geekmux]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

Because the end-user equipment will change, that's why.

Tell me how often those problems crop up today with a single iPad (or like hardware) user. Cloud computing needs little more at the user end.

Now, tell me how often those problems will crop up across a 100-person company to the level that you could actually justify local IT staff vs. the much cheaper "oh, yours is broken? OK, go get a new one out of the box" model.

What will drive local IT staff into obsolescence is the lack of troubleshooting. This alone will ultimately drive them into extinction as we become even more of a throw-away-and-replace society. The only way I see that not happening is with massive regulation to curb our disposable habits. Doubt that will happen against a much more profitable model for the manufacturers.

Re:Survey?

[MightyYar]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Does that make it a fog?

Re:Survey?

[MightyYar]

If there is a temporary shortage of dumb terminals, you can always temporarily sit at an absent employee's desk or use a terminal that is in a common area. You'd still be way better off than in a non-dumb-terminal situation where you have to wait as IT attends to your personal computer since you can't work on any computer in the building.

We're actually going backwards where I work, relying more and more on RDC/VNC. When my computer was down the other day (for an upgrade), I had to kind of limp along on lab computers and the network drives.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you got modded down and the GP got modded up is the third example.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

And before that, networks of 3270 screens connected to a central host. Problem is, the more 'intelligence' is concentrated the greater the dependency on good screen design (forms) and reliable networks. Don't know about anybody else but that hasn't been my world -- poor design, unreliable networks and clueless management is pretty much the norm. So I am glad that the 'cloud fairies' have some new kind of sizzle to sell. But it is the same old song...

Re:Survey?

[nurb432]

Some of us remember further back when we actually did this, with the mainframes.

What happened you ask? The main reason that mainframes went away for most people is that by nature the users wanted control and perceived lower cost. local computing power gave them that control. At a huge ongoing cost ( more support, viruses, etc etc )

Done right, you can get the same experience in your applications via a cloud that you can get locally. But i do agree that the network becomes the key component. It just *has* to work right or it all falls apart. But if you think about it, as so many apps are tied to a shared data services today ( databases, web apps ) if your network sux, your locally hosted client sux too.

Re:Survey?

[PopeRatzo]

That may be handy for a block of 25 year old Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I'll take the Offtopic hit, but damn that reminds me: Did you hear about this recent Parmigiano Apocalypse in Italy? An earthquake destroyed a large portion of the world's supply of Italian Parmigiano. Prices are already skyrocketing here in Chicago and this just happened a few days ago.

Apparently, they're giving away the stuff in Italy because it's all broken up or something, but they can't store it or ship it. There were reports on the radio a few days ago.

I don't think I'm prepared to start eating a domestic Parmigiano. I've got maybe a few pounds of the Reggiano in the fridge in the basement that's only good for storing cheese because Parmigiano makes everything else smell like old gym socks, but that's going to run out eventually and then what'll I do?

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful on all observations. What I really see, is everyone trying to use cell phones like they would a computer. Roughly translated, that means that the business world will run to programmers to sort out their fuzzy-wuzzy-dohicky needs. Most people loath analytical thinking. I don't mean they aren't interested. They HATE it.

The bottom line is that another business sector in the U.S. will be ruined by empty suits who can't be bothered with "small" affairs. If the help desk can't break through the "blooie" (for the uninitiated, Blue "E" or Internet Explorer") ignorance, just wait until the programmers have to.

No, really! Go to the Wall St. Journal site and see how many CEO's are 6 foot or more tall Lurchs who think they have a clue about anything other than destroying infrastructure in the name of the stock holders. The rich want arm twisters. They don't want technology unless it's in the form of a strap-on that they can shame their fellow stock holders with at their next party. Big, BIG MEN!

What a dumbass country. It can't fail fast enough.

Re:Survey?

[Vintowin]

Ladies and Gentlemen, In this corner, weighing 245 pounds, wearing the cheeto and Mountain Dew stained shorts, our reigning champion, Larry the Tier 1 Tech! and in this corner, the challenger Weighing in at 435 pounds, her fudge stained shorts smelling of Chanel, Susan the Admin Assistant! Let's get ready to ruuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmble!!!!

Re:Survey?

[E_Ron.Eous]

What goes around comes around. Been there, done that at least twice.

Re:Survey?

[Lumpy]

The first tip off is....

"Tech industry experts are saying"

These people are NOT Tech industry experts, they are posers and wannabe's that make crap up and then blog about it in hopes that under-educated CIO's will listen to them. See, for example, all the content in CIO magazine and how the existence of it makes any IT engineer cringe.

Re:Survey?

[Lumpy]

Hello IT! Is your Cloud plugged in and turned on?

Re:Survey?

[MachineShedFred]

Because there's never any issues with user accounts, authentication, VPN connections, VDI agent installation, servers, network, etc.

The modern support center does call routing in addition to simple break / fix support. If they can't fix it, they can escalate it to those who can. That function will still be necessary.

Re:Survey?

[couchslug]

Fine with me. More hardware churn is good for vendors, and I don't really care if my employer has problems they deliberately asked for!

If I can't work and it's not my fault because my bosses were stupid, then I still get paid. Nothing that can't be dealt with using a healthy "fuck you" attitude.

Re:Survey?

[jythie]

I think this cycle is getting as predictable as death and taxes....

Re:Survey?

[tibit]

Agreed. Cloud computing doesn't mean that you don't have a desktop PC that you have to log into just to use the web browser and the printer. Where are all those cloud-thin clients deployed? I somehow don't see them... These days, "thin clients" are often desktops with a 3270 terminal emulator, or an RDP or VNC client. It's interesting how many businesses still use mainframe tech. Sometimes I see thin intranet shims over 3270, and that's even funnier. A real 3270-like or RDP/VNC terminal with remote provisioning would probably be truly zero-support, but desktops sure as heck aren't.

Re:Survey?

[gtall]

Hmmm...and thus the Distributed Cloud was born in the year 2016. Before that, cloud services were centralized and so were downtimes. Managers felt that this was a denial of service to the worker bees and in order to keep them happy, a distributed form of cloud service was necessary. In the new concept, individual PCs will perform cloud services for individual worker bees...at their OWN desk. Hailed as a remarkable productivity enhancer that made men stronger and women prettier, Management declared Victory with Honor and many awards were passed out. The Business World heaved a sigh of relief that the cloud scourge had been fixed. Techies merely heaved.

Re:Survey?

[MachineShedFred]

My cable box is a piece of shit, and I want to put a big gaping hole through it with a .12ga slug.

That being said, the company I work for is HP's largest thin client customer. In certain situations (retail) thin clients are great. For general purpose use (offices), a more flexible solution is necessary - we use standardized OEM PCs and laptop models with our custom Windows image.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it an effing rest, will ya? We're talking about computers not polictics.

Re:Survey?

[L4t3r4lu5]

To the user, "the cloud" may as well be "the website" or "the internet" or "the server". They interchange all freely, when talking about the desktop, their word processing package, the printer, the coffee machine, the keypad for the front gate...

Yes, your ID card doesn't work because there is a virus in the reader, and nothing to do with the fact that it looks like you folded it in half to fit it into your purse.

Re:Survey?

[tibit]

The miniaturization and high intergration is the sole reason for that: the cost of physical goods is tiny compared to the cost of maintaining a human service person. Just look at how little goes into, say, an MP3 player. The main PCB is usually the size of a quarter and weighs less than that. A highly skilled, very well equipped service person could perhaps repair a couple of those a day. He/she needs food, clothing, housing and entertainment. All that to get a couple boards fixed that can be had off eBay for $40, and that cost maybe $0.25 in raw materials (silicon, fiberglass, resins, copper and gold), and where the value added in manufacturing adds barely two orders of magnitude.

Re:Survey?

[sycodon]

The Cloud is down...we're going for bagels.

Re:Survey?

[QuantumRiff]

And of course, nobody will EVER print anything with the cloud. Printers are from hell.. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

Re:Survey?

[Miamicanes]

> The goal though is the clients are fully generic.

Yeah, they're fully generic, as long as they're running Windows XP, a specific version of IE6, and have precisely the correct DLLs installed to handle the stupid "thin client browser-based application" the company had written during its thin client fetish circa 2001.

Or the slightly more modern one that would only work as long as your computer had a specific old version of Java installed, and would intentionally commit suicide if it detected that yours was any newer -- partly Sun's fault(*), mostly the development team's fault... they stupidly used the CLSID that means, "Ignore the JPI control panel settings and blindly use the latest one available on the computer", then followed it with a dozen if/then Javascript statements that probed the fsckin' applet for the version of the JPI that was running it and KILLED IT if ($version > 20). Jesus. God. Naked. On. A. Motorcycle. The breathtaking incompetence was unbelievable. Of course, this made things even MORE fun when YOU had a development role (unrelated applications), needed a newer JDK, and had to run the application under VMware so it could have its old JRE without screwing up Eclipse. Or when the old versions of Java became known to be vulnerable to a major exploit, and the entire company was prevented from upgrading for weeks because it would have broken that one application.

(*) I partly blame Sun, because their official documentation has ALWAYS done a totally crap job of documenting how JPI CLSID values work, and as a result the majority of JPI-dependent applets end up getting launched with CLSID values that are sub-optimal at best, and completely dysfunctional at worst. Hell, I've been using JPI for years, and pre-StackOverflow, *I* barely had a coherent understanding of what different values did and the contexts under which it was appropriate to use them.

Re:Survey?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oh, I'd be the last to disagree with the notion that terminal servers suck. I have the pleasure of fighting with several on behalf of a client.

My point was just(in response to hairyfeet's point that 'cloud' is 'thin client' all over again) that 'thin client' didn't actually change staffing patterns too much(slightly fewer desktop hardware monkeys, though not too many fewer because thin clients still have to be deployed, cabled, etc. just not drive-swapped as often); but an increase in junior server admins because terminal servers require all the babying of a desktop(with the additional quirks that come with desktop applications that aren't validated or supported to run multiple-concurrent-user on server OSes. Also, nothing brings out the true horribleness of common printer drivers quite like running in an environment where one user's print job can crash the spooler for everyone and you can't 'just reboot'...). A modest change in staffing patterns; but not actually as much of a reduction in staff as one would expect.

In a true 'cloud' scenario, though, most of what you are paying for(and enduring the risk/lag/bandwidth demand of offsite delivery for) is a reduction in application management. All those exchange admins, application server jockies, low-end DB guys, and so forth. In the (at present hypothetical) 'pure cloud' environment, you'd pretty much have nothing but the junior techs who deliver replacement computers to users who need them, and rebuild the stock image every six months(assuming you haven't gone full Chromebook or something, in which case that happens remotely as well) and the network guy who makes sure that LAN and WAN keep talking to one another...

Re:Survey?

[gtall]

Related to "if you don't know what it does, don't touch it" is "don't trust anything if you cannot see where it keeps its brain" (Molly Weasley) So, I guess we cannot trust many "executives".

Re:Survey?

[machine321]

The dumber the terminal, the fewer hardware faults, OS problems and malware, no?

Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :).

I thought that too, and suggested terminal services and thin clients at my company. Turns out today's thin clients are just Win7 machines that are slow and hard to patch, but by the time I realized it the executives were already sold. We would have been better off re-using existing old hardware as "thin clients".

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Glad you agree with the distinction.

is a reduction in application management.
Exactly. Though once you get rid of highly versatile desktop apps don't forget you pick up complexity in your server apps.

and the network guy who makes sure that LAN and WAN keep talking to one another

That BTW becomes vastly more complex. Traffic is now up 1000% at least. All sorts of issues that weren't worth worrying about are now worth worrying about.

Re:Survey?

[crazyjj]

Cloud computing doesn't eliminate the morons using computers.

Not to mention the fact that I have yet to see the Cloud fix a hardware problem, or deal with a user who needs some specialized software installed, or deal with a brown-out, or help string cable, or replace the drum in a printer....

Re:Survey?

[SScorpio]

Wyse makes some that are deployed at a client of ours. http://www.wyse.com/products/cloud-clients/thin-clients

It's not a true cloud setup as they are using RDP to connect to a local terminal server, but this server is replicated at a remote data center, so if the server were to go down because of a hardware issue, they could then be redirected to the remote server.

I'm not sure which model they are using but I think it's either the Wyse S10 or S30. These have a very basic OS build in that allow some windowing support so you can have multiple RDP sessions, they also have some that support dual monitors.

There have been cases where were one of the boxes has gone bad and we swap it out, but that's a simple case of unplug the power, monitor, keyboard, and mouse and connect them to the new box and the user is up and running right where they were.

Even with this setup, it hasn't removed the need to support individual users. It has removed a lot of the hassle of hardware failure causing weird issues only they see. But users still run into issues they need individual support for.

Re:Survey?

[Shirogitsune]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

So, if the cloud is down...does that mean it's foggy?

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Yeah, they're fully generic, as long as they're running Windows XP, a specific version of IE6, and have precisely the correct DLLs installed to handle the stupid "thin client browser-based application" the company had written during its thin client fetish circa 2001.

That's the point why I don't consider remote clients to be thin clients.

Your Java story is the problem of supporting bad software. Bad software is bad software. I will agree though that Java doesn't deliver on the "write once run anywhere" the way it should. HTML (not Javascript) is pretty good on working anywhere, Flash ain't 1/2 bad. But if you want to see this done right look at the old textmode: curses libraries, termcap and terminfo.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

My cable box is a piece of shit, and I want to put a big gaping hole through it with a .12ga slug.

Maybe but how many times has the cable company had to service it? And couldn't they just mail you a new one?

As an aside. Have you considered going cable card and getting a Tivo? I've been a customer for years and love it.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use old gym socks.

Re:Survey?

[azalin]

Do you know how often a help desk call involves accurate descriptions of the real issue at hand? How many times have issues like "OMG the mailserver is down!!!!" resolved be plugging in the f*cking network cable or switching the wireless switch on someones laptop back on?
It is somewhat fascinating to see how people get through traffic everyday alive just to switch their brains of at work.

Re:Survey?

[CAIMLAS]

Individual PCs can prevent "everyone is down due to the cloud", even with a server-centric or even thinclient architecture. I've worked at such places where there hasn't been a single network-wide outage for periods of 6-8 months with regularity.

Guess what it means, though? You've got to:

* buy enough of the right kind of equipment
* hire the right people to manage said equipment
* hire enough people to maintain those systems

Short of catastrophic equipment failure, there are few reasons for such outages. A properly maintained environment doesn't have these problems (with any regularity).

Re:Survey?

[crndg]

Actually there are some differences. Putting everything in the cloud helps with disaster recovery and continuity of operations (COOP) planning, which was not as big a concern before 9/11, and was not addressed by having your own local server. Security will only become a concern after a big embarrassing breach. Otherwise, the contract you have in place with the cloud provider simply states that they do everything for you, up to whatever standards are required by your agency or industry, which actually saves your company or agency lots of time on documentation. And network speeds and availability in general are higher today than back then. Add in the ubiquity of personal devices and services for phones a pads, and you can see the circumstances are significantly different today.

I'm not saying it's going to succeed this time. Just that it may not be quite as cut-and-dried as you present.

To argue with myself, some of the uniquely cloud-related problems that people may not be thinking about yet are: what happens when your cloud provider suddenly closes their doors, either because of bankruptcy or (Megaupload, anyone?) legal issues? What happens when your cloud provider gets purchased by Google or Apple, and they change your contract? If there is a data breach, who is responsible for reporting? Notifying affected parties? Paying penalties?

Many of these can be addressed in your contract with the provider, but they need to be addressed from the start.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Babylon will fall and we will see it in our lifetimes.

Re:Survey?

[mlts]

For "cloud" access, a "thin client" has to be pretty beefy, because for access to "cloud" applications, the client will have to have not just a keyboard/mouse/TCP/IP stack (like an X-station), but a full OS that has to handle security, a Web browser with support for add-ons, and some form of persistent storage (so each machine can be uniquely identified via remote via a cookie, "super-cookie", LSO, or whatnot.)

With persistant storage comes HDDs or SDDs.

Desktop IT support is not going to vanish anytime soon:

1: Someone has to deal with broken machines/terminals in users' cubicles of offices. In theory, switching out a thin client would be the best thing, but in reality, thin clients tend to usually be more expensive than a generic x86 desktop, and with a desktop, parts can be swapped which means another client doesn't have to be purchased if one breaks. Of course, if it is a new thin client, it will have a different MAC address, so it won't be allowed on a locked down corporate network, which brings us to the next point.

2: There are going to be network admins. Packets don't magically route themselves, so someone is going to be there making sure the routers are working and secure, and local company policies are enforced. That way, a worm originating in one corporate department stays in that subnet and doesn't wind up in receiving or sales. Even if things work perfectly, someone is going to have to be there every six months to upgrade the router OS every time Cisco makes a major security update package.

Personally, cloud computing has its place, but it is not a cure-all, just like Javastations were not a cure-all when that was the rage, nor were X-stations the cure-all when that was important.

Re:Survey?

[weszz]

Exactly... if you are the IT person running the cloud, it had better not just be a cloud to you... It NEEDS to be these servers with these names doing these things instead of some abstract thing that just kinda works and no one knows why... More server and citrix based stuff just means you move support personnel from the desktop to the server, but you still need the people.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh god that makes me cringe. I hate phone calls that start with "is the system down". i like to respond with "what system". "um i mean the server" Ok buddy we have just one server.

Re:Survey?

[MightyMartian]

We're working with a critical cloud app where I work, and an asshole with a backhoe gave us an all day outage yesterday. With the old in-house system we could have just kept going, but now a serious outage here or at the data center means work stops.

Re:Survey?

[azalin]

It's bad, but not that bad. The usual consumer grade Parmigiano is only stored for a few months before it can be shipped. It does affect gourmet grade Parmigiano up to a certain point, but still it's only a temporary problem. The production facility still exists and the damage to the storage unit itself is minor. That said the value of the destroyed cheese is immense.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

no no no... the proper terminology would be "It's foggy"

Re:Survey?

[CAIMLAS]

What you complain about are implementation problems, not conceptual problems. Cloud computing is much, much more sensitive to implementation specifics than is a local setup.

The exact same things that is gonna happen this time,

What? What happened last time is that the price of desktops dropped precipitously while server cost remained the same, and terminal services on Windows and the common hardware really weren't suited for the number of users necessary to make it a financially wise/break even proposition.

worries about data security,

Last time, there weren't any, as near as I can tell.

having a whole office sitting on ass if the network ever goes down, lag and crappy hosted apps not being as good as rich desktop apps, which BTW none of these problems have been solved by replacing net or server with cloud.

No, but these really aren't problems with terminal services today. You can play 3D games on TS quite successfully, over a fairly crap network.

I guess history doomed repeat and all that.

The only thing repeating here is marketing and sales have a new shiney to sell.

Cloud computing is a stupid idea at this point, but something else has changed. The problems present in what was sold as the next big thing are no longer there, with many more benefits that weren't available previously. In-house terminal services are most certainly worth looking into now.

Re:Survey?

[canadiannomad]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Chicken Little was already saying this long before cloud computers.

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

IT Raining. Pun intended

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

With all the hotheads and gasbags in the office, we'd have to watch out for F4s and F5s when it happens...

Re:Survey?

[Scarred Intellect]

The first tip off is....

"Tech industry experts are saying"

These people are NOT Tech industry experts, they are posers and wannabe's that make crap up and then blog about it in hopes that under-educated CIO's will listen to them. See, for example, all the content in CIO magazine and how the existence of it makes any IT engineer cringe.

Oh, so Wired said this? It's safe to ignore, then.

Re:Survey?

[RobertLTux]

"My cable box is a piece of shit, and I want to put a big gaping hole through it with a .12ga slug.

Maybe but how many times has the cable company had to service it? And couldn't they just mail you a new one?

As an aside. Have you considered going cable card and getting a Tivo? I've been a customer for years and love it.
"

i think buckshot would work better but of course "magic fixing dust" would be best

unknown of course not being the original poster but if the problem is with the design of the box it may not be fixable and good luck (roll 78 on 4d20 level) actually getting a factory new unit and not a refurb unit (that most of the fix was GooGone and Windex)

many cable companies have CableCard info as TOP SECRET BURN BEFORE READING (or otherwise actively block CC use)

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your hopping, which like so many others have ended up in the unemployment line. Never underestimate how much they want to get rid of you.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

If implemented properly, the cloud being down wouldn't even be noticeable.

Some of you may see how, others have learning to do.

Re:Survey?

[CohibaVancouver]

Cloud computing doesn't eliminate the morons using computers

I work in the business of security software for endpoints. What I'm hearing from customers exactly matches Gartner's figures, and our declining business in that segment reflects it. If everyone has a thin client at their desk then all the support issues around the desktop largely go away - There are no drives to fail, no malware scans to run etc. If a hardware component does fail you just unlock the cupboard and swap in a new endpoint. The end-user could do this. As for application support, by 2020 the majority of users will have grown up with computers since they were toddlers. "Gladys in accounting not knowing how to boldface" will be a thing of the past. And if a user needs to know how to do something with an app, they'll as Mr. Google or their peers. Will there still be IT support staff? Yes - But, as the article says, there will be many fewer of them.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure the Doctor treating that heart problem thinks they are so dumb. Lets put this in perspective children dumbing down is a good thing because for most who work on computers their needs are for it to work not to figure out what is the latest error message, so yes I do see lots of people and I mean a ton of people loose their jobs in the coming decade as cloud computing takes over.

As for PC at least most of the doctors I work with at the hospital can't wait for them to go and tablets or something like it takes over. How far we have come in such a short time. Still people like me and maybe some of you will be fine since you will learn to adapt to the future need of the system, others oh well who cares about the others.

Re:Survey?

[camperdave]

Don't think circle; think pendulum. A pendulum swings through its optimum center position, then reverses and swings the other way. Each oscillation, though, is not as high as the previous, and it eventually comes to a stop. It used to be big iron and dumb terminals. Then it went to a personal computer on every desk. Now it's swinging back to big iron and dumb terminals. However, the big iron isn't big iron any more, but a cluster of machines, and the dumb terminals are PCs, or even smartphones. Eventually, companies will settle on the best blend, my guess would be "dumb" terminals on the desks which are small computers hosting virtuallized machines, a local server for the mundane tasks (issuing virtual machines, maybe local branch office business logic/data tasks) and buffering "the cloud", and full blown cloud services at the corporate level.

Of course, technology is constantly changing, machines are getting smarter and smaller, communication is getting faster and more reliable, data storage is getting better as well. Also, everything is getting less expensive. This means that the settling point of the pendulum is itself constantly in motion.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what about the untold truth? RDP/VNC desktop SUCKS. No, really, did we just manage to have all these powerful and neat GPUs, just to trow them in the garbage for the sake of the cloud???

If you ask me, whoever "invented" the cloud terminals, should be punished to sit in front of IBM 360 terminal, black and green, and do all of his job until his eyes water down like an acid lake. God Save the GPU.

Re:Survey?

[jedidiah]

Except you don't need "the cloud" to achieve any of that.

80s style network computing or 70s style mainframe computing worked the same way.

You really don't need to be dependent on some outside company on the other side of the Internet that doesn't really care about you.

Re:Survey?

[cyber-vandal]

There was cloud computing before that. It was called a mainframe. Stupid buzzwords.

Re:Survey?

[TWX]

Doubtful on all observations. What I really see, is everyone trying to use cell phones like they would a computer. Roughly translated, that means that the business world will run to programmers to sort out their fuzzy-wuzzy-dohicky needs. Most people loath analytical thinking. I don't mean they aren't interested. They HATE it.

It's called "Bring Your Own Device" or "Bring Your Own Technology" depending on who you talk to.

Right now it's all the buzz in educational technology circles, as school districts think that it'll let them reduce their IT budgets while providing more access. The thing they fail to realize is that every major K12 educational software success story is backed by hundreds of failures because it's rare to find people that both know how to educate and know how to write good software. Programmers rarely actually know what the teacher and students truly need, and teachers write shit code and lack basic understanding of the client/server model. I've seen this with typing software, test scoring software, reading comprehension software, and all sorts of other packages that simply do not implement client/server where the user can log in at any workstation and do the task at hand. Hell, Accelerated Reader, one of the most widespread ed reading packages, ran on friggin' MacOS 9 boxes as a server well past the debut of OSX.

They want little johnny to be able to e-mail/sms/mms his answer to the electronic whiteboard so that the teacher can display his and everyone else's answers to talk about them. They fail to even grasp the possibility of little johnny e-mailing "suzie likes cocks!" to the board, or a semicompromising picture of the teacher when she had bent down to deal with some crap the students messed up, and not having good filtering. Sure, the kid can get into trouble for this kind of thing, but that doesn't stop the teacher from losing control of the class, permanently.

Cloud, BYOD, all crap. All marketing terms. All a bunch of HIPPOs who think they know best who refuse to speak with their actual IT staff when making decisions. They're going to spend a boatload of money to "save money" and in the end they're going to be back to buying more computers.

I've seen it before, and I'll see it again.

Re:Survey?

[jedidiah]

> I am sure the Doctor treating that heart problem thinks they are so dumb.

I had to teach one of these about "right clicking" once.

When it comes to computing they are in fact dumb as rocks and totally helpless. All of their intelligence doesn't come into play because the general attitude of anti-intellectualism that YOU embody discourages it.

Self inflicted and completely avoidable but still real nonetheless.

Re:Survey?

[jedidiah]

Did you ever see the prices on terminals?

Even dumb terminals were surprisingly expensive. It seems that dedicated thin clients have always been far more expensive than their hardware warranted. This inevitably leads to the obvious cost discussions. You can even see it now on Ars with the new Samsung Chrome box.

The up front costs of dedicated terminal hardware always makes a "real PC" seem like a better option.

It's really quite perverse.

Re:Survey?

[Voyager529]

It is somewhat fascinating to see how people get through traffic everyday alive just to switch their brains of at work.

You seem to be of the persuasion that their brains are on while they're getting through traffic.

Re:Survey?

[MightyYar]

Do you work in a trailer park?

Re:Survey?

[drerwk]

Was the backhoe near your building or near the hosting building. I guess I'm asking if the single point failure is something your company could have mitigated?

Re:Survey?

[hawkinspeter]

I guess you'll have to try some other cheese. There's several varieties - you might find one you like.

Re:Survey?

[gx5000]

Been hearing this kind of management nonsense for too way too long now.... Cloud computing will sooner or later bring down Governments and Companies that choose to have their Data and Infrastructure supported and held by third parties....

Re:Survey?

[gx5000]

Exactly, but how much money will change hands in the process ? How different is this from the Industrialized Defense Complex throwing money out the window on projects they know will probably fail in the long run that make millionaires ?

Re:Survey?

[gx5000]

Intelligence is rare, stupidity is infinite.....so yes.

Re:Survey?

[gx5000]

Too many people planning with zero real life experience in the trenches, you know the story.... But it's all about the newest biggest thing and the money, always the money...

Re:Survey?

[Dripdry]

You might check Pastoral if you don't already get your cheese from them. Their selection is a delight, imo.

How can someone love P.R. *that* much?

Re:Survey?

[gx5000]

We also benefit from living in a paperless society...huh wait...

Re:Survey?

[CohibaVancouver]

Except you don't need "the cloud" to achieve any of that.

No, you don't need the cloud, but it's appealing to the bean counters because it's cheaper than maintaining that stuff yourself. I happened to sit next to an exec on a flight a couple of months ago. He got to talking about IT, and for him, outsourcing to the cloud was appealing because of the cost savings and the fact that maintaining racks of servers was not a core competency for them. They outsourced their cleaning and vehicle maintenance - Why not IT?

You really don't need to be dependent on some outside company on the other side of the Internet that doesn't really care about you.

Many companies are of the opinion that their in-house IT doesn't 'care about them' either. Besides, 'care' is just an emotional construct. You define the SLA and that covers the 'care.'

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

If only I'd invested in cheese futures...

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

One time, a "email is down" ticket was escalated to me, went down and looked and the guy's computer was actually shooting out sparks and smoke.

Still you sound like an asshole and I bet they can't wait to replace you with something soft-n-fluffy sounding.

Re:Survey?

[The Grassy Knoll]

+1 for the "IT Crowd" reference - c'mon mods!

Re:Survey?

[grumpyman]

Totally agree. Virtual desktop is going to that direction, of course, unless somebody mess up / infect the VM-base, or hardware problem.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm calling it reservoir computing.

The "cloud" rains programs and data down to various data storage locations where they are installed into data "reservoirs". The users of these "reservoirs" can then manipulate the data and run the programs completely from their local computation device.

When a user is done with the data, he can either choose to "evaporate" the data and stick it back in the cloud where other people can view it, or just hold onto it, or send it "downstream" to someone else's reservoir (without going through the cloud) for collaboration.

Re:Survey?

[avandesande]

Does anyone even know what a desktop tech does nowadays? Most of the time they figure out issues and push a patch remotely to your machine- how will this be any different when your desktop is a virtual workstation?

Re:Survey?

[avandesande]

I can't remember the last time I had a hardware issue- almost all of the issues were configuration, firewall, permissions or domain related. None of these problems go away with a thin client.

Re:Survey?

[swalve]

Well, there is some utility in that. If all your workstations are really bare-metal VMs in a huge cluster, simply running an instance of the client desktop on their console, and all your "servers" are just distributed across the virtual cluster, then it should work fine. Probably super easy to do with storage, since desktops in most large orgs have tons of space for what they do. So, concatenate all that unused storage into a "cloud SAN" with double or triple redundancy and you don't need separate hardware for at least some of an org's storage needs.

Re:Survey?

[swalve]

Look at zero client technology. For some environments, that should be all you need. Why over complicate the thin client with security and operating systems when you can uncomplicate them into basically X-Servers. Hell, combine the thin client with an IP phone, and you only have one device on the desktop, that is basically troubleshooting-free. Sure, you have to have big machines in the datacenter, but don't we have that already?

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

When someone won't refrain from bringing politics into a subject wholly unrelated, or when they are just being insulting and offensive, it helps to think of them as being mentally ill - The anger is replaced with pity when you realize that your transgressor isn't playing with a full deck.

Re:Survey?

[ILongForDarkness]

Agreed. and BYOD policies mean more time involved in figuring out how to get someones gadget to play nice with the corporate network and more gadgets. If everyone can bring their tablet and phone versus the old way where you had to be important enough to warrant a standardized corporate gadget lots more gadgets per user. Much more gadget types etc. Nothing but work and headaches in the future for Tier 1 guys ... enjoy :-)

Re:Survey?

[strikethree]

I know you were just being sarcastic, but amazingly, you nailed it... however, you forgot something (which is really the benefit that cloud computing could bring us). All of that cloud computing taking place on your desk gets automatically replicated to a remote (under the same company's control) server.

"Cloud computing", in its current incarnation, is only attractive to Law Enforcement Agencies and the businesses who actually run "cloud" services. There are no actual guarantees of keeping business data private from other businesses. No, a signed piece of paper stating, "No Guv'nor, our employees are guaranteed not to be able to sell your data and run off to a desert island with his/her new riches.", is not good enough. If the servers will be under another person's control then the key used to encrypt all of it needs to be under the information owner's control. That, and the inevitable downtime, are the reason cloud services will never take off for smart businesses.

Creepily, the CAPTCHA is "unknowns". Cue (queue?) the Twilight Zone music.

Re:Survey?

[tqk]

If I can't work and it's not my fault because my bosses were stupid, then I still get paid.

Until some slick salesdroid/MBA comes a calling with, "I can fix that fault and you can eliminate all the positions it affects with $whiz_bang_brand_new_shortsighted_stupid_idea!"

Enjoy your stay on the unemployment line.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's so poh and mba's can say be greatful you still have a job heres a 200% pay cut this year Techies.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one of the biggest cultural problems in the IT world is that we have a view of the end user as a mouth-breathing cretin. The problem isn't that these people are stupid, it's that they couldn't care less about something that is of vital interest to us.

I don't know why we're so bent out of shape about this. Different strokes for different folks, and it keeps most of us gainfully employed and out of mom's basement. Don't hate them for being apathetic, thank them for a lifetime of guaranteed work.

Re:Survey?

[fhic]

"Hi, this is Bob in accounting, the Help Desk app looks like it's down."

"Hi Bob. Yup, its down. There is no ETR. I can't give you a ticket number because it's down."

And poof! We're back to scribbled notes on paper, and a really bad day for the poor folks on the Help Desk. And in the meantime, there are no tickets coming in, so the folks who can actually fix anything are clueless. Great plan.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

can't wait for them to go and tablets or something like it takes over

And when someone has to explain to the doctor how to unpinch or drag something on a tablet or deal with their rage over them gripping the tablet with their thumb on the screen? As someone who works on tablet-based EMRs, let me tell you that the doctors will be willfully ignorant about whatever they want to be, it's your job as support to deal with the results.

Good luck getting them to cope with tablets without a support staff to blame all their ignorance on.

Re:Survey?

[hairyfeet]

Ya know, I never did understand that either, it was like the thin client companies WANTED to fail. I mean you look at one of the thin clients from the heyday of thin clients, the Sun Ray...what was in it? A small ARM CPU, a small amount of flash, basic video and audio...that's it. hell the same hardware is used in those $40 PMP/Game players you pick up on China Mart yet they wanted nearly $400 for the thing!

It seems like for the limited niche case of cloud/thin client somebody would cook up a sub $100 unit and still be able to make a decent profit. After all ARM and NAND is cheap, you can use linux to bootstrap the hardware and call terminal services so no cost there, hell it should be easy peasy to get something small enough you can VESA mount the whole shebang and call it a day. Sadly for thin and lights its cheaper for me to simply slap a stick of RAM and a HDD into one of those E350 nettop kits than it is to get a thin client new even in this day and age, it just don't make sense!

Re:Survey?

[Vancorps]

While I agree with your premise as accurate, I don't agree with the conclusion. There will always be a need for the "how do I do this?" support that desktop support often fields. Around here at least, the majority of support is not fixing things but helping people figure out how to do something. A cloud won't change any of that.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the "computer" a user is using in the cloud just a Windows machine running remotely right? They can still get viruses, they can still have software issues, you can still have issues with your business applications, they can still have patch problems, they still need applications installed, they will still be "one off" applications etc.... You will have specific virtual machines for specific users, you will have pools for general users, you will have pools for accounting, pools for HR and so on. Each will have different software and applications on it that still need to run and be supported. Granted, if you use pools of desktops and mount home directories you may be able to recover them quicker than replacing a PC at their desk but that is now done by a desktop administrator through a console instead of a Tier 2 tech swapping out a freshly imaged machine. If seen both of them do this and it takes about the same amount of time if your user data is already stored on a server. Also, the user will still have questions on how to format a document, how to enter their time in your time keeping application, they will still have internet sties that "don't load", java and activeX issues, documents that do not print correctly, trouble opening and editing PDF files.

The only thing a virtual desktop does is move the main thing they use to the backend. This has many advantages, mainly in consistency and DR, not really for the end user advantage or a cost advantage yet. It eliminates "their computer" although they will still need something to attach to that virtual desktop and it has to work as well.

You drank too much of the your vendors Kool-Aid if you think moving someone windows experience from a local machine with a server backend to a remote machine accessed from another device will reduce end user problems. Hardware problems may or may not go down, that is it. Either that or you have financial interest in virtual desktops or cloud services. There are many advantages to using virtual desktops. Saying end user support and end user problems will go away is not one of them.

Re:Survey?

[Krishnoid]

How very true. I think you have to have done customer support recently (within six months) to be mentally grounded in what the day-to-day of is really like. I tell people, "Customer support is where every issue ends up that QA, New Product Development, Sustaining Engineering, and Documentation failed to catch. It's where every corner case goes to die."

I'm not sure it's wholly accurate, but I use it as a starting point for discussing the topic.

Re:Survey?

[couchslug]

"Enjoy your stay on the unemployment line."

I am literally enjoying it ATM, through no fault of my own and at no inconvenience to myself.

My employer (the department boss IS an MBA!) ceased to hunt government funding for workforce training and chucked most of a department.

They were making a NICE profit too, but are now content with farming Pell Grants (the "corn ethanol subsidy" for community colleges).

It's all good.

Re:Survey?

[Targon]

The mistake is in thinking that having their brains "on" would actually help. The problem is that we let stupid people reproduce.

Re:Survey?

[Ravaldy]

I second CAIMLAS,

Key is in redundancy and proper management of equipment/software. In our environment, individual computers have software. Nothing else! Users are useless if the network goes down so Cloud or local servers are practically identical.

To deny that a form of cloud computing isn't the future of IT is to steer your IT department blindly. The demand for system support will definitively drop but the need for IT assistance in general won't. (How can I save my excel 2010 file into excel 2003??...)

Re:Survey?

[starfishsystems]

of all the places you could start with slashing the costs thereof, you start with the one that most executives understand the least about

Ah, but this is exactly why the push toward cloud services is happening in the public cloud, with private cloud being almost entirely an afterthought. From the executive point of view, moving into the cloud is not a big disruption. It's just replacing one incomprehensible infrastructure run by a bunch of anonymous tech drones with another.

Now, we could argue that such a perception is utterly wrong, that complexity and reliability and security issues don't magically go away just because a new abstraction layer has been added on top of them. But we're not the ones making the money decisions.

Re:Survey?

[Vancorps]

How so? Just because the server is running a linux hypervisor doesn't mean the resulting Windows virtual desktop is any different to manage. You still need centralized patch management and scripting. Backing up the user world becomes a whole lot simpler though as you don't need any fancy folder redirection or roaming profiles. This makes it look more flexible to the end user and makes it easier for SysAdmins.

I feel dirty making a case for cloud technologies. Of course in my case, the cloud is local, in my datacenter and under my control. If I need more horsepower temporarily and it's not sensitive in nature I can scale out to Amazon or the likes. Odds are it's easier for me just to add another node to the cluster though. Cheaper too in my experience. Of course I don't throw away a lot money on consultants when I can just set it all up myself.

Re:Survey?

[Vancorps]

What thin clients did you go with that were Win7 based? Hell, all of ours are ARM based linux boxen connecting to Citrix XenDesktop where they have their familiar Windows environment.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and even before that, it was 3270s, VT52/VT100's, H/Z19's, etc. hooked via serial lines (which went to mux/demux/concentrators) to mainframes.

When I was at Abbott Laboratories, one of the developers there was telling me that Way Back When, each pair of cubicles had a "port" in the wall, with a shelf/table, and a terminal that was on a lazy susan. Each pair of developers had to share a terminal!

Re:Survey?

[hillbluffer]

How will "cloud computing" stop morons from installing virii and trojans on their desktop machines? Yes, "cloud computing" does away with the need for local tech staff to manage email and web servers... Google Apps does well for the company I work for. But local IT techs still have to maintain the network, and the end-user machines.

Re:Survey?

[mathfeel]

So...it's foggy in the office?

Re:Survey?

[hillbluffer]

Yep, "dumb terminals" here we come again... Actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client which still have a GUI, but store most of their data on servers. Leaves less for users to foul up.

Re:Survey?

[hillbluffer]

Yep, because when the cloud is down, the users wander around aimlessly, unable to find or do anything *chuckle*

Re:Survey?

[Darinbob]

All it takes to become a "tech industry expert" is buying a name tag.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, and it will stop the entire company from working when it happens.

Entire company? Possibly the entire INDUSTRY, if not the entire ECONOMY... Nothing like putting all your eggs in one basket, and one that someone ELSE is in charge of.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Which means he'll need far MORE training than current helpdesk people"

Training? What is this..."training" of which you speak?

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Just because the server is running a linux hypervisor doesn't mean the resulting Windows virtual desktop is any different to manage

I think you are missing the point of cloud. There is no "Windows virtual desktop". This isn't fake thin client like citrix, this is the real thing. You don't run a normal desktop OS at all on the client either virtualized or actual.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Understood. But it is rarer than you think because they want to charge extra for renting the box and they can't if it ain't optional. Many of them also support Tivo in some other way.

Re:Survey?

[Darinbob]

IT has an odd history. Early on we had mainframes managed by the information priests, actual users could not use it without permission because they were extremely expensive to use and you had better have a damned good reason to use it (although corporate photo ops with the big machine were allowed of course).

Then minicomputers came out and a lot of departments and remote locations purchased these to get out from under the IT tyrrany, but these were complicated to maintain so they'd hire some local IT staff so that actual programmers and engineers could spend more time working. Over time though the head office IT group would grab control over the local IT staff, offering to centralize services and reduce overhead, and IT was firmly in charge again.

Then the microcomputers actually got slightly useful, and managers and offices would buy them to be able to get some local word processing or spreadsheets done without begging indulgences from head office IT overlords, and they could also double as terminals into the minis and mainframes. That lasted awhile. Eventually they started to approach actual usefulness, to the point where many even forgot that there were minis or mainframes anymore. You had a computer at your desktop and it was your and yours alone and no bozo in the back office could tell you what to do with it.

Then networking became all the rage. Offices started wiring up their buildings more widely, connections to remote locations were fast, etc. Initially only minis/mainframes were on this network but some people decided they wanted to put their desk computers on this network too. Email would be more convenient than having to log in remotely first, people wanted to share files with the person next door, etc. But this is where IT pounced. In exchange for access to the glorious network the user must again relinquish computing control to the central priesthood. Their desktop computers no longer belonged to the users if it was on the network. Centralized control again.

Next up, "smart" phones and pagers and other mobile devices. IT grabs control of these as well. Cloud computing, IT grabs control. CEOs are completely unable to tie their own shoes without an IT flunky helping out so they allow IT to do whatever it wants. Soon you will have to approve all home use of computers as well, and linux and bsd boxes will be kept in the basement surrounded by barbed wire and guard dogs to keep some last vestige of independence of thought.

Re:Survey?

[jvillain]

That is pure wisdom on display.

Re:Survey?

[Corson]

Bring your own toy, why not, but it ain't gonna replace the two 22 in monitors sitting on every desktop in every organization claiming to have switched from paper to electronic documents.

Re:Survey?

[Vancorps]

I'm not sure where you are getting your information from but every thin client being deployed today is usually either RDP, VNC, VMWare VDI, or Citrix. RDP and VNC are giving way to virtual desktop streaming due to it being a whole lot more flexible. The whole reason desktops came back into fashioned was because of the over dependence on a terminal server. If you are out in the field then you need a complex setup VPN setup to secure everything if such a thing is even allowed. With VDI in place you have a much simpler web portal with a myriad of encryption and authentication options.

The "point" of the "cloud" is to abstract the work from the hardware that it is running on. If you experience hardware failure you should be able to connect from another machine and pick up where you left off. The same goes with a hardware failure at the server level. There is nothing new about cloud computing. It's a stack of tools designed to smooth out deployment.

When I connect to the cloud, guess what I'm doing? I'm using RDP into Amazon to control a virtual Windows server. When I'm using SQL Azure I'm connecting to a SQL server the same as I would anyway. The only difference is that the SQL server is load balanced and distributed across multiple servers. Of course then we're getting into cloud services for back office infrastructure which is a bit off topic.

Let's be clear, IT Desktop support will change but certainly won't go away because ultimately people want and need access to their web browser, they'll want fast access to their files, they'll want clustered computing resources for 3d rendering, all of this can only be done in a VDI environment, RDP and VNC are insufficient for those tasks.

Our thin clients have USB webcams hooked to them which passes through to their virtual desktop. When they take a picture the image is saved inside the virtual desktop to servers that are in a data center in the same building even when the webcam is 3000 miles away. It's the same speed whether they are at HQ or in Fiji. That is the point of the cloud.

Re:Survey?

[painandgreed]

> I am sure the Doctor treating that heart problem thinks they are so dumb.

I had to teach one of these about "right clicking" once.

When it comes to computing they are in fact dumb as rocks and totally helpless.

Doctors are a weird crowd. I do desktop support at a hospital and have for a long time. When helping a doctor you don't know, there is no what to know what level of expertise they will have. I have also taught some doctors about right clicking, and I have also been called into a doctor's office where he started to ask me all sorts of esoteric questions about network protocols that I didn't even understand because he was trying to get the client for the DICOM image server application he wrote in his spare time to work a little faster. Then you can run the gamut of everything in between. Of course, I have also done desktop support for programmers and can say the same thing having taught programmer how to change the screen resolution on their windows computer. Sometimes it's ignorance, and sometimes it's simply a case of not wanting to learn. I have met both doctors and programmers who are in the mind set that they do their job and that's itso there is no need to know other stuff since there will always be somebody like me around.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

It means one IT worker can support many more computers, and needs less training thus lower pay. This is very good from a business perspective, but very bad for job satisfaction

Not really. As per your example, you're just shifting the problems from the from end to the back end. Instead of screwing up individual PCs they'll be screwing up VMs that you can't simply erase and clone because some idiot up the line decided that "local" storage on a VM was a good idea, or because someone's instructions for a procedure include "click the third icon down".

Re:Survey?

[hairyfeet]

I wonder why they can't ship it? I don't see why they couldn't just package the pieces in boxes and take a price hit, which I bet is what it REALLY comes down to, artificially keeping the prices high. But I'm sure people that like that cheese (can't stand the smell myself, it turns my stomach) would be happy to buy it, busted up or not.

Re:Survey?

[hairyfeet]

But WHICH version of HTML? I've seen 5 different browsers load a page 5 different ways. sure it wasn't a BIG difference, but when you are using it for applications i imagine that difference WILL matter. that is how we ended up stuck with IE 6 for so many years ya know.

But considering I've had to do rollbacks on certain browsers because a customer couldn't get a certain FB app to work in the new version i have a feeling we'll be in for the same old headaches unless someone designs their apps for browsers from half a decade ago, because nobody truly supports the "standards" but just variants that can change with each release, which as I'm sure you know in browsers has been breakneck for everyone but IE.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

You are talking about cloud for servers, and abstracting away things you want to do on your severs to cloud services like AWS. The article is talking about using SaaS / Cloud to replace desktop apps and thus allow you to replace desktops. Think something like Chrome OS. The hardware strategy for the server team is obviously not going to have any impact on the desktop staffing needs.

In terms of the desktop, I call what you are talking about in terms of VMWare or Citrix desktop virtualization not thin client and not cloud. It sounds like you have a nice VDI setup but that probably takes more staff than a bad Managed Desktop setup.

Re:Survey?

[hairyfeet]

Except now you have the problem that many of the ISPs are overselling like mad and are not rolling out the lines to compensate. so unless you are one of the ones lucky enough to have your business in a FIOS area you could find your shit slowing to a crawl at random times.

I've dealt with plenty of businesses with business connections and frankly many of the ISP are so damned overloaded that no matter what you pay unless you have the $$$ to have private lines run to the backbone you WILL be looking at random slowdowns, which considering doing everything in the cloud will boost your line usage by 1000% any slowdowns are gonna seriously hurt.

This might work in EU and Asia, where 100Mbps full duplex is becoming common, but here in the USA the backbones like everything else is falling apart and just can't take the strain. personally I blame Wall street, which rewards short term thinking and punishes long term, but no matter what the cause if you are gonna be in the cloud you better have a shitload of bandwidth and in many areas of the USA that bandwidth simply isn't there 24/7/365.

Re:Survey?

[machine321]

WYSE of some model, running Win7 Embedded. Looking at their web site I think it's the C90LE7. They have a VIA Eden 1GHz processor, and it's pegged most of the time.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nail on the freaking head.

I'm in an Ed Tech program right now and the instructors in this program couldn't bloat themselves with any more fluff if their lives depended on it. They make an art out of the prima donna complex! They seem to have this inclination that they're not only educators but also real techies just because they read PC World or whatever journals each month and can recite a few buzz words... And I swear they get off on telling you that "the cloud is coming" if you're against it (like they feel you cowering and running away with a tail between your cheeks). It's so obnoxious and annoying but when you come from a tech background and see that the king has no clothes, well, it just gets old.

Ed Tech instructors are dandies, without a doubt. Like most worth-their-money instructors, they have big hearts and extreme passion for teaching and research, but for crying out loud, keep them away from computers, especially PHP...

Re:Survey?

[halltk1983]

Rackspace (my employer) does sell private cloud services. You could maintain the keys to that. But you pay enterprise prices, because it's an enterprise solution. If you want commodity prices, on the commodity product, you get the commodity server. Can a tech look into your stuff? Sure, if you give him the password, or aren't monitoring it for password changes, or are paying them for management on the server. But access is tracked, as are changes, etc. So, it's about as safe as paying someone to manage your servers in house. After all, a piece of paper with your employee to stop him from selling to your competitor isn't good enough either, if a paper with a service provider isn't.

Re:Survey?

[hairyfish]

I've seen it before, and I'll see it again.

It's a bit like the NASA space pen anecdote. My wife is a teacher. She had her blackboard replaced with a 'smart' board so she can do all sorts of interactive lessons and bring education into the 21st century! When it works it's great, except prep time now takes 10 times longer, when it breaks she has to reschedule all lessons until it's fixed (weeks), and repair costs 100 times as much as the old system and takes 100 times longer to fix.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if it is raining and there is a different cloud now!

Here is how India's ex Tax Commisioner explains...(Hillarious)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQlMm39xr0

Re:Survey?

[Macgrrl]

SCSI was from Hell, printers are merely from Limbo.

Re:Survey?

[Macgrrl]

I'm guessing it's normally shipped as wheels, with the skin keeping the cheese 'fresh'. The broken wheels means the cheese will turn faster and probably go moldy.

Re:Survey?

[vandamme]

This is Slashdot, where every thread sooner or later turns to atheism, politics, or sex.

Re:Survey?

[Vancorps]

Given that it's a staff of one I beg to differ. Also note, Chrome OS still uses the same tools, it just uses cloud storage. Windows 8 will be the same way if you choose to run it that way with Skydrive. I've never seen a thin client setup that didn't take you to a familiar interface. SaaS can be a number of things, Office 365 is one example, and then there is the Adobe model, with the Adobe model you are running the same software on a machine with proper specs to handle the task at hand.

Every thin client I've encountered from back in the day to present day gave you a native interface. Even thin clients back to an AS/400 with text based forms provide you the same interface whether you use a laptop with full software stack or a thin client. A virtual desktop is just the logical extension of this.

So in short, I'm not sure what you think a thin client is. From banks to insurance companies to my own infrastructure it doesn't line up.

If you're talking about strictly web-based SaaS then Office 365 can still be an attack vector for malware. I don't see corporate computers going 100% web due to restrictions when you're traveling. By the time SaaS catches up to allow offline use you circle back to beefier machines and the cycle continues.

For me, the vast majority of users get a cheap $300ish thin client, the traveling users get a real laptop with SSL VPN and connect using a Citrix receiver. It works fast over the Internet, if they are completely offline then they can operate their virtual desktop locally, it will sync back to the server when it gets back to the Internet. This isn't hard, is exceedingly easy to back up, and is much more efficient due to being able to hop over to a spare thin client if your laptop dies.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Chrome OS still uses the same tools, it just uses cloud storage.

No it isn't just cloud storage, the applications aren't meaningfully local. That's a huge change.

Even thin clients back to an AS/400 with text based forms provide you the same interface whether you use a laptop with full software stack or a thin client.

What laptop ran OS/400 (now I-Series OS)?

I don't see corporate computers going 100% web due to restrictions when you're traveling. By the time SaaS catches up to allow offline use you circle back to beefier machines and the cycle continues.

Once you allow offline use you are no longer a truly thin client. That's where I'm drawing the line.

As for the last comment about blowing images on.... I agree. VMWare View type stuff is great. That's just not what the article is about.

Re:Survey?

[jbolden]

Standards compliance is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I've been using KHTML and Gecko exclusively for over a decade with few problems.

Re:Survey?

[tqk]

So you're saying I AM psychic. I hate it when that happens.

Re:Survey?

[ebvwfbw]

I've seen it before, and I'll see it again.

Cloud computing - psft! That's so 2011. We're onto Tsunami computing. That's where you can access terrabytes of data with just two lines of code! Here's an example (Presented by a hot chick with short skirt):
#include "stuff"
run stuff;

See, how simple is that. Stuff has everything you need!

I understand "Cloud computing" is wearing out just like "utility computing" - what cloud was called before.

Dream On

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, right, for about 5 min. then the internet connection on the client side is down;) what then?

Re:Dream On

[AK Marc]

You don't need desktop support for WAN outages.

Re:Dream On

[rvw]

Yea, right, for about 5 min. then the internet connection on the client side is down;) what then?

Go home and work from there.

What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[rebelwarlock]

There's no article here. It's just a bunch of marketing crap.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Even the basic premise doesn't stand up to a cursory glance. In order to use cloud computing people are going to need computers, which are going to need er, support. Doesn't matter what they are being used for, its the same machines.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Z00L00K]

In a way the article is right - but it ends up that we are turning back to the mainframe computer with terminals. The difference is that the terminals are a bit smarter today.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[AK Marc]

Anyone in IT who thinks this is news is a teen or a manager who was never technical. Mainframes were the first attempt at "cloud computing". Then we had mini-computers for distributed processing. Then to micro-computers with centralized computing again (telnetting and terminal emulations, BBS, etc.). Then distributed again as PCs grew in power. Then centralized/cloud again when servers had a resurgence in the '90s (the birth of RDP, Citrix, VNC, etc.). Then that was abandoned as PCs became more powerful than the servers of 2 years before. And now we have the massive push for "cloud" again. Same shit, another decade.

And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

"And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources)."

Not really some things have economies of scale and startup costs.

But as long as you're not a small business, or you'll only ever what one, then it's probably cheaper to go in-house. If you are a government or large business it's nearly always cheaper to in-house, but then you can't play silly accounting games like you can for per month service charges.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[_KiTA_]

Even the basic premise doesn't stand up to a cursory glance. In order to use cloud computing people are going to need computers, which are going to need er, support. Doesn't matter what they are being used for, its the same machines.

Yes, but if the support is lowered to "Swap out dumb terminals when they're broken and call Dell for hardware swaps" then you can do that with 1, 2 guys. If the OS and all the apps are hosted and served up remotely... ...Actually...

This isn't anything new, is it? Dumb terminals have been around for decades and didn't end the desktop. Every few years they come up with a new term for it -- this time it's apparently "Cloud Computing" -- and the tech pundits, hoping for clicks, talk about how it's going to be the year of the post-desktop.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[SuricouRaven]

one or two guys working for a little above minimum wage. If there is no need to actually diagnose and repair anything, the training time is reduced to a one-day orientation course.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Kjella]

And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house.

By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates. Supporting your basic desktop is not something unique to your company and there's typically economics of scale. I doubt you need exactly twice the IT staff to double from 200 to 400 users. For an outsourcing company that might be increasing the desktops under management from 10,200 to 10,400 instead, they can do it for less because of economics of scale.

Just to take one very obvious example of non-core activity at least here in Norway a lot of the big companies use one of the same two-three big cafeteria operators. Why? Bigger quantities of food both in purchasing and in preparation, better redundancy in kitchens and serving staff and all the overhead is spread across more customers. By far most companies would prefer to simply hire in a company that's specialized on doing exactly that if there's a reasonable number of suppliers they could switch between. When to take the total cost of doing it in house, it just isn't worth it to most companies.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Geeky]

And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house.

Not always. Take email, look at the costs of using Google mail vs. running a complete, resilient mail system. Control over your data aside, for most small to medium businesses gmail will be a lot cheaper, not to mention more reliable and functional.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[randomsearch]

> And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house.

Simply untrue. I'm an academic writing and reading a lot about cloud computing right now, and I can tell you that studies and anecdotal reports both show that outsourcing in its traditional and cloud-based form are both cheaper - *provided* that you are starting from scratch. Migration is another issue entirely.

RS

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[sco08y]

There's no article here. It's just a bunch of marketing crap.

What about that graph at the top? It's in 3D! With reflections and everything!

And it clearly shows how all your devices can be connected to one of those screw and nail organizers you can buy at Home Depot.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[realityimpaired]

But as long as you're not a small business, or you'll only ever what one, then it's probably cheaper to go in-house. If you are a government or large business it's nearly always cheaper to in-house, but then you can't play silly accounting games like you can for per month service charges.

It depends on which tools you're actually using, and where they are. Most of the tools I use on a daily basis at work are online. All I really need to do my job is a net-connected workstation with a decent browser and a connection to the company intranet (either by VPN or actually plugged in to the company network). I do have MS Office on my office workstation, but all of the functions I'm actually using with it exist in the web-based version of Office.... it's nice to have the desktop version of Outlook installed/running because of the way it integrates with my voicemail and desktop alerts, but I'm not tied to it. In fact, the only tool I use on a daily basis that actually needs to be installed is Remedy, which is a painful piece of shit to work with, but could probably be coaxed to run under Wine.... my understanding is that they're already working on a web-based interface to the databases I access through Remedy, though, because they have realized that it's probably not a good idea to continue trying to support a 15-year old 16-bit database application. :(

When you have an office set up like that, especially one that's spread across multiple locations with tens of thousands of workstations to support (most of which only need access to the network and a working browser), it really doesn't make sense to have an in-house IT staff at all locations, especially if the business you're working in doesn't involve computer support. Set the system policy up so that users can't fuck anything up, and aside from hardware attrition, workstation software support is pretty much a thing of the past. The result is that we need a *much* smaller IT department, which largely consists of hardware support people and tool owners, at which point it makes most sense to outsource it.

Ultimately, it depends on what you're doing.... there will always be industries where it makes sense to have in-house IT, because there are tools which need to be installed. There will also always be industries where the desktop itself is largely unimportant, and where it's economical to outsource IT.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[jbolden]

Dumb terminals have been around for decades and didn't end the desktop.

First off in anything it was mostly the other way around. The rich desktops killed the dumb terminals. But... if you think about what happened right after, we moved towards the world of locked down desktops. The rich configurable desktops were killed by a push back in the dumb terminal direction.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[DarwinSurvivor]

Totally visited the article just for the graph. Totally not worth it.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

There never was a "cloud" before companies starting offering vast amorphous resources. Mainframes were fixed, you couldn't simply triple its processing or storage without massive costs and space issues. "cloud" doesn't mean big box, it means flexible resources scaling to your needs (or budget).

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

In-house e-mail is always more functional unless you employ the most useless dumbed down solution. Though I agree them being cheaper and mostly more reliable. Costs of reliability are always high.

But both in and out-sourcing has its merits. I know several attempts to out-sorce this or that company activity and then quick panic-mode attempt to restore in-sourced solution due to several disatavnteges that were quickly overcoming saved quids or huge drop in customer's respect due to conflict between company expectation and standards used by out-sourcer.

I think cloud computing brings lots of new possibilities for out-sourcing and tbh biggest challenge for current outsourcer as they will be those hit the hardest. Cloud companies are all new on the market or moved from slightly different markets. Cuurrent out-sourcers have to adapt ( and this will be hard considering they are usually several hundred people companies with quite low level of technical expertise ) or die.

Desktop support actually will thrive rather than decline. You have to connect to clouds and soon to sevral of them simultanously - probably one conflicting with another. Then we have a dozen of different platform - smart*s, tablets, ultrabooks, appledevices, multiple systems, different hardware platforms - how will it simply out the desktop management cause currently it gets lots and lots complicated.
.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose dumb users will have to support thierselves when they can't figure out why when they paste it never pastes what they want to copy. Of course they are not copying what they want to paste, but it's the cloud, the computer should know that!

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Viol8]

"Take email, look at the costs of using Google mail vs. running a complete, resilient mail system."

By resilient I assume you mean MS Exchange that doesn't fall over every 5 minutes? Simple - use a unix box running sendmail + pop3/imap and point something like Thunderbird at it.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[tibit]

The problem is that while in reality you can perhaps switch cafeteria providers with minimal fuss, an IT service provider needs to learn your infrastructure, and it's not really comparable to learning the layout of an industrial kitchen. If you're competent, you can walk into a cafeteria area and perhaps in an hour or two you can be fairly familiar with all the equipment, layout, etc. It should take no more than the first week of operation to shake things down to a smooth ride.

If you're very lucky as an IT provider, you'll be given a 400 page, version-controlled operations/configuration manual that was maintained up to the last minute by the previous team. It'll take you a month just to make sure you got everything that's there, and that they didn't miss anything out. I have just such a manual in the works for a 20 person small business. It's currently at 200 pages, and relevant parts are autogenerated from running system configuration. For a business with a couple hundred people in it, the manual would be a 1000 page work, and probably would require a dedicated person just to keep it current. Just so that you can do an IT team swapout in a couple months, if you're lucky.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Viol8]

"By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates."

If you ran your own silicate mine you wouldn't buy in silicates from elsewhere. His point is if you already have the staff and infrastructure and perhaps are even in the IT business its cheaper to do it yourself.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's *always* cheaper to in-source

Well, not always. Small businesses aren't going to be able to do it cheaper, for example. And "the cloud" gives them access to resources they'd simply never try to get on their own. But I do agree that as the company grows, you eventually reach a 'break-even' point and in regards to any business of significant size you are 100% correct.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

In house tech support will be cheaper for dealing with your own specific infrastructure. If your infrastructure is exactly the same as everyone else's, then somebody might be able to take advantage of scaling and find a way to "mass produce" support for it.

Of course, if your the exactly the same as everyone else, it's likely you could just outsource your entire workforce, or are about to be eaten by a bigger company.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Necrotica]

Unless server/network operations are a part of your core business function, then no, it's almost *never* cheaper to in-source.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[aaarrrgggh]

Cloud computing is generally cheaper in the short-term, rolling your own cheaper in the mid-term, and buying an app cheaper in the long term when life-cycle issues come up. What boggles my mind is that rolling your own often has a 6-month payback over current cloud computing solutions. As long as the time-to-market is less than 2 months (which can be ambitious), things like SalesForce seem to fail.

We decided to purchase an accounting system rather than roll our own (specifically work from an open-source ERP system to add the functionality we needed). We spent about $50k in the first 12 months to get a system that was marginally effective after 6 months, and has $5k annual costs. I had pegged the cost of rolling our own at $20k plus the loss of 4 months of my billable time; the latter part is what killed it-- it would be $120k total in the first year.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Exchange is a pain in the ass, and I have no personal experience with Sendmail due to my young age, but I seem to recall an entire section of "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook" was dedicated to it..

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Viol8]

Its a pig to set up but works well when it is. At any rate, any port 25 server program will do.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[grumpyman]

Seriously this?

"And it's *always* cheaper to in-source (provided you can find the appropriate resources). You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit. So outsourcing costs you a minimum of 20% more than doing it in house. But all the consultants swear it's better to outsource - to their company. That's like hiring the Fox and Co security company to guard the hen house. "

Which Fortune 500 are you the CIO? Oh they're all idiots, right, right...

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah let him be. He probably doesn't use banks to store money and lives off grid generating his own power and growing his own food.

It boils down to cost. If you can carve out services and get the same service for a better price or a better service at the same price it might be enough to overthrow inertia, but you never know what newfangled technology will popup on the horizon and make people think about making changes.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[AK Marc]

There's obviously a barrier in place for everything. Recruiting costs for hiring a new employee. Building billion dollar manufacturing facilities. You know, the little things. That you are equating $10,000 in headhunting with $10,000,000,000 in capital expense for manufacturing indicates you are either dumber than a rock I pissed on yesterday, or you have made up your mind about liking outsourcing and won't let logic get in your way.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[AK Marc]

I've never seen an agreement where a printer lease worked out cheaper than a printer purchase. The last lease I looked at was a "free" printer (with a minimum charge, so it wasn't free if you didn't use it), with per-page costs that work out to about $1 per page color and $0.10 per page black. The cost of toner and paper was well below those. So there may exist some usage level, just above the contracted minimum, where leasing was the right choice, but I guarantee there was no financial analysis done. The reason for the lease was that the "old" printer (a nice HP that has *never* had a single issue or fault) had a toner cartridge that was $200+. Sure, it was a 10,000 page cartridge, but the thinking was "the next piece of paper out of that printer is $200" so they threw it away and leased a printer with a much higher cost to operate.

That's the thinking that results in outsourcing.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[AK Marc]

I never said they were idiots. There are lots of valid reasons to outsource, and "cost" is never on the list (unless you are lying, which does happen most of the time). An issue of where the costs are, how they hit for tax reasons (paying someone in India may trigger different tax rules for a US company for insourcing losses and outsourcing profits to minimize tax). But if you have a 30+ person IT department and then go out and pay some company for a database development (one of he most common idiot outsources I see, generally because nobody in house is an Oracle expert because they have no Oracle systems, but there are piles of SQL gurus, but the CIO read that everyone is using The Oracle these days and wants a The Oracle database holding the CRM and inventory systems). So if you want to game costs to hide/move them, outsourcing is a great idea. But for reducing the total costs, outsourcing will rarely meet that need.

The income of your parents is likely a better predictor of becoming CIO than your own intelligence. George W Bush made millions in business deals before becoming President. Are you really asserting that "non-idiot" is a requirement for success?

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[hairyfish]

By resilient I assume you mean MS Exchange that doesn't fall over every 5 minutes? Simple - use a unix box running sendmail + pop3/imap and point something like Thunderbird at it.

Lol, and when your users want shared calendars and contacts and webmail and UC? ie actually collaborate? The cost of basic Exchange server will set you back less than $5k. For most businesses you would lose that much in productivity if your cloud was offline for 5 minutes.

Re:What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[Kjella]

If you ran your own silicate mine you wouldn't buy in silicates from elsewhere. His point is if you already have the staff and infrastructure and perhaps are even in the IT business its cheaper to do it yourself.

Well sure, if you first decide what staff and infrastructure you have then decide what business you want to be in but most companies do it the other way around. To take an example from the IT industry that's maybe more relevant, AMD used to run the own fabs. Then they spun off GloFo and now they've divested themselves of it and become a fabless company because they decided designing CPUs is what their core business is while they could buy processing time from TSMC. It's actually quite common that businesses do this, saying we don't want to do this ourselves anymore, lay off, spin off or sell the business then hire that service back in from the open market.

Wiped out or shifting?

[Manip]

You always see this kind of language when disruptive change occurs (e.g. production lines Vs. hand built, car Vs. carriage, electricity Vs. coal, etc) but all that really happens is the jobs shift from one area to another, and that people need to adapt or die.

Desktop Support MIGHT decline, but we will see growth in service level jobs at third parties. Instead of having in-house IT staff teach people how to use e-mail, you'll have someone across the country or globe do the same job.

I guess one might argue that you can shift the jobs abroad, but as we've seen in the last few years such out-sourcing is not cost effective in the long term (or at least with skilled jobs it isn't).

Re:Wiped out or shifting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess one might argue that you can shift the jobs abroad, but as we've seen in the last few years such out-sourcing is not cost effective in the long term (or at least with skilled jobs it isn't).

Might want to get the MBA mills to take note of this. Far as I'm seeing, upper managers largely still think outsourcing the crap out of everything beginning with IT is the best idea since sliced bread.

Re:Wiped out or shifting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe at the Big Boys, but our clients who work in mid-small businesses tell me that management is in-sourcing these days.

Yeah right

[Foske]

Sounds like wishful thinking to me. I don't believe in the cloud, and I think many will follow when the first mayor cloud-outage or data breach has occurred. Also, staying connected to the cloud is a challenge itself, which will still require a lot of jobs. We recently had a three day down-time in our organisation, which effectively made them three lost days. Connection issues to the internet are a daily thing, but since we don't use the cloud that only delays my Slashdot posts...

Re:Yeah right

[Bongo]

I agree although perhaps it isn't outages that'll put people off. Just musing this as I once again waited for the very unreliable bus this morning -- yet I still use public transport.

I think the cloud needs to do something that can't be done any other way, and that's the reason people would use it, and even depend on it. Like syncing stuff because it is too much hassle trying to remember which docs I copied to which piece of hardware, or like setting my device at home to record a show using my mobile, or using my mobile as a boarding pass. These are all new applications that people find handy. And sometimes they don't work, but they're still handy.

But putting it all in the cloud just for the sake of it? Why? What's the point? You'll need some IT people on site, if only to plug in those wires to the cloud, or show people how to login to the cloud, or decide which cloud to use.

Not that these are the best examples, but like, Apple: yes you can reinstall your whole operating system from the cloud if you need to in a disaster. Google: your whole system is just a local cache and really it is all in the cloud which you need most of the time. The first is something new you couldn't do before. The latter is kinda, well, why? The latter would make sense if laptop hard drives were still tiny. Instead they just give you a tiny hard drive, because well, why?

If I removed the kitchen and bathroom I could live in a smaller cheaper house. But again, why? It isn't so expensive to add a kitchen and bathroom, and they're very handy.

Re:Yeah right

[Ksevio]

I think many will follow when the first mayor cloud-outage or data breach has occurred

Or they may move to the cloud when their P3 running the in-house services fails and they don't have a proper backup system, or gets hacked.

You have to remember that not all businesses have the money for proper infrastructure, security, and staffing, so if the cloud can do all of that for cheaper, and reduce the points of failure to only the internet connection (though only failure to connect to it, not data loss), they're going to see that as a major benefit over managing their own system.

I know we've had some downtime when a older source control machine went down and there were no spare power supplies on hand to fix it (small company).

Survey-vertisement

[antifoidulus]

This survey is done by Gartner, and thats all you really need to know. Basically its a clever ad for Gartners consulting services "cleverly" disguised as a survey to try to give it some sort of credibility.

This isnt the first time they have done this, this wont be the last. I remember back in 2003 they basically came out with a survey that stated something along the lines of "by 2010 around 50% of all US IT jobs will be offshored...oh and apropos of nothing, we just HAPPEN to have an offshore IT consulting service. What a coincidence! Contact us now for a no-fee consultation, and remember, 50% of all jobs, you dont want to be left behind, call today!"

However their predictions werent even CLOSE to being true, I would be surprised if 10% of all IT jobs are now done offshore, still a large % to be sure, but nowhere near what Gartner was predicting. Of course, Gartner doesnt have a vested interest in being truthful, they have a vested interest in creating alarmist headlines to try to drum up business for their shitty consulting arm.

Re:Survey-vertisement

[Opportunist]

Well, they were not lying. They were just off by a few years. 50% of IT jobs were going offshore by 2006. By 2010, they were all back again...

Re:Survey-vertisement

[fwarren]

These are the same people that predicted the massive rise to hundreds of millions of Netbooks after the first Netbooks hit the market. From 2009 we can see that their 2012 predictions are off. They did not see Microsoft killing the Netbook market. They also failed to note at the time the rise of the iPAD.

It is almost to the point that if Gartner predicts something I can be sure that is the ONE thing that won't happen.

Re:Survey-vertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

That. Gartner doesn't make money if people do things they know which work. They make money by having clueless IT and business execs charge off into things they know nothing about, and for which they just happen to offer consulting services.

However, don't underestimate this. "Cloud computing" may be (ok, is) snake oil, but most executives are idiots who never listen to their own people about anything. The whole off shoring trend was a perfect and tragic example of managing by following the heavily marketed and hyped trend. Of course, since no executive ever makes a mistake ever, we will continue to be stuck with poor decision making.

Re:Survey-vertisement

[jbolden]

I would be surprised if 10% of all IT jobs are now done offshore

What! Think about all the application development jobs. Think about all the inhouse software development jobs using remote teams. Think about all those call center support jobs. Hardware manufacturing jobs. I'd be shocked if more than 25% of the total possible jobs are domestic.

Good riddance

[coder111]

I don't really like "cloud" as a solution for this, but I think desktop support is a waste of resources. Be it thin clients, remote administration, Linux on desktop or whatever, but anything that cuts down desktop support is a good thing in my book.

And if you are worried about lost jobs, well, breaking windows is also a job, but it does no good. These people would be more beneficial to society doing something else.

--Coder

Re:Good riddance

[DavidRawling]

Desktop support isn't just about the hardware and OS. It is also about "how do I do X" and "I can't access the Internet". Both of which require hands on help, if not always, certainly often. Plus as others have said, it is a poorly disguised marketing effort by Gartner, so ignore it .. SITREP normal for now.

Re:Good riddance

[dkf]

[Desktop support] is also about "how do I do X" and "I can't access the Internet". Both of which require hands on help, if not always, certainly often.

Accessing support on the cloud when the 'net is down is... challenging. (True story: we had a taste of that yesterday due to a bad BGP route pushed by an upstream provider. Irritating as blazes — Slashdot was one of the sites I had trouble reaching — but fascinating to watch and see which of our core services had been outsourced.)

Re:Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought most IT professionals spent their time fixing broken Windows.

Re:Good riddance

[lightknight]

Nonsense. They spend much of their time explaining to users why their latest machines are lacking "cup-holders."

Re:Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly. Windows has been broken for years - otherwise there'd be a lot less need for Desktop Support.

Re:Good riddance

[tompaulco]

desktop support is a waste of resources
The desktop support at my company is certainly a waste of resources. The position is staffed only about 20 hours a week, but the office has people in it about 60 hours a week.

Re:goose peeking out from within my anus

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I have one now, but his web feet are tickling me inside.

Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Who validates such bullcrap to be published on slashdot ?
There is not even a single argument or anything, just FUD and buzzword.

Re:Seriously

[thomst]

And Anonymous Coward asked:

Who validates such bullcrap to be published on slashdot ? There is not even a single argument or anything, just FUD and buzzword.

In this case? Samzenpus.

Re:goose peeking out from within my anus

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you moron, that's a duck.

desktop (desk side) vs service desk / remote

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst there may not be much need for desktop support positions I would imagine a number of service desk people for remote support would be needed. The company I work for has essentially been doing cloud infrastructure for the past ten years - think terminal servers and citrix. You may not need much desktop (desk side) support but you do need people to help with general connectivity, basic workstation management, printing and process issues.

Will the cloud magically train users?

[brokeninside]

I worked in desktop support for a number of different companies. (I've also done software testing, and programming.) Currently, I do end user support for a vertical software package.

Anyway, in ten years across four different firms supporting everything from commodity hardware to custom software, one thing has remained constant. Most support calls aren't for the sort of configuration and installation issues that the cloud solves. Rather, most support calls are for users that are unable (or unwilling) to read the manual or to show the user how to do things that are either too basic or too complicated to have been included in the manual.

Moving to the cloud isn't going to magically make a user understand the difference between a short cut and a file. Nor is it going to explain to them what those numbers in that report that hits that one table in the database means.

Re:Will the cloud magically train users?

[lightknight]

Hmm. I've noticed a perverse kind of...obsession among management types to 'get rid of IT.' I don't know if it's inter-company politics, or pure jealousy, but the talk / attempts lately seem more...intense. There is no real reasoning behind their desire to remove IT, just a feeling.

And I say obsession, because that's what it is. You can have 30+ incidents or attempts by one group or another to outsource IT, have wasted hideous amounts of resources doing so, and have everyone know that it's a mistake to even think about it, yet someone will give it another go. I'm starting to think that some of the other departments have let the "IT is here to serve you" i.e. "they are your gophers and willing bitches" go to their heads, and think, for some odd reason, that outsourcing IT will result in better service ("Hey, if we don't like they way they treat us, we can just cancel the contract" -> "Hey Idiot, if you just imported all of the companies data to a third-party, and you don't pay, they lock you out of your own database; plus, God help you if you took advantage of their API, no one else will be able to use that software without a rewrite.").

Re:Will the cloud magically train users?

[dkf]

Hmm. I've noticed a perverse kind of...obsession among management types to 'get rid of IT.' I don't know if it's inter-company politics, or pure jealousy, but the talk / attempts lately seem more...intense. There is no real reasoning behind their desire to remove IT, just a feeling.

It does vary between organizations, but it's probably down to IT being seen as a cost center and a roadblock. On the first point, you need someone in charge of IT who can explain what value IT provides to the rest of the organization (remember, being a cost center isn't a problem if those are justifiable costs that enable other parts to be very profitable) and on the second, try not to spend your time saying "no"; it's far better to be able to say "can't do it this way, alas, but if we change things slightly to that way then we'll be able to make things work well". And try to avoid getting stuck with Compliance; everyone hates those guys.

Re:Will the cloud magically train users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Management realizes that in 10-20 years, software will replace them.

Re:Will the cloud magically train users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving to the cloud isn't going to magically make a user understand the difference between a short cut and a file.

No, it will do much better than that. It will remove the concepts of short cuts and files altogether.

Anyone that knows anything...

[Karmashock]

If you know anything, you know that's nonsense. For one thing, most companies require services not offered by the cloud. Beyond that, never under estimate the user's ability to not be able to find the O.N. button or otherwise screw up a foolproof system.

The IT situation is going to change. It always does. But abstracting it all to the cloud isn't possible unless you have a custom database designed for the amazon cloud or something and even then you've got the whole IT department that manages that.

Beyond that you have local files. Telling businesses that they can't get access to anything if the internet drops isn't going to work.

There are just so many serious fatal problems with this idea.

This funny little video touches on a few:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU

Yes yes... evil M$... insert hiss and boo... but we're talking about end user business software. Have fun clawing Excel out of their cold dead hands.

Re:Anyone that knows anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious that you don't really know either what is meant by "the cloud" or much about it... The cloud is a term which I don't really like much as it lets a lot of IT Managers abstract things that they know nothing about and then sound like they are experts, however the concepts behind the term work well.

Take your obsession of hanging on to desktops for local files and some strange notion that you need to "custom" design something for the cloud.

Even here in local government we are working now toward introducing a virtual desktop infrastructure where users will use dumb terminals either to sign on to a virtual machine or to a virtual desktop. In management lingo it's a "cloud" service, in reality it's racks of servers with virtual machines running on them, to the user there's no difference between this and a full local machine (unless the network goes down, in which case these days they'd have difficulty anyway). The user will get their own desktop, their own storage that to them appears to be local but the cost of the kit on the desk becomes so little you can litterally throw away the old kit when it fails and slap a new box in. On top of that the users "local" files now follow them from machine to machine and they can access their own machine remotely very easily. It also means that all support for the OS and applications can easily be handled from the datacentre... the list goes on.

The idea that the world stops if the network goes down as a reason to not get this kind of set-up for any *large* organisation is nonsense. If you are a fairly large organisation the likelyhood is that your world stops if the network goes down in any case, no access to email, no access to hosted applications... the list goes on.

Re:Anyone that knows anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand your point and mostly agree, but I'd like to play devil's advocate: if the network goes down and you have a regular desktop, you can still work on your reports, spreadsheets, and etc. that are all locally stored on the PC for at least some period of time. If the same documents were stored on a cloud PC, you'd be 100% unable to do anything for the duration of the outage.

I'm not saying that the costs outweigh the benefits, but it's not as simple as you make it out to be.

Re:Anyone that knows anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually worked in support? You're handwaving his (true) point that there are major differences here from the customer's perspective.

When the LAN drops, you have Bob to yell at, and since Bob's very job rests on fixing this problem you can rest assured that he will bust his hump to fix it and prevent it from happening again. If the cloud goes down, you're looking at some faceless support organization for whom you are merely one client. Maybe they are better, maybe they are cheaper, but when accounting has no access to the general ledger, those distinctions tend to become fuzzy. What's the point of IT (a cost center in the minds of executives already) when they can't even be responsible for downtime?

Losing the Internet when all your stuff is local has an impact, sure, but intra-company e-mail still works, and everyone has access to their local files. Losing the Internet when you're on the cloud means all productivity comes to a standstill. Even losing local network may not stop everything in a traditional setup, but any disruption in local or outside access stops everything in the cloud. And again, you may have demonstrably less downtime with the cloud, but the first time the CEO's Administrative Assistant can't do something that she would have been able to if you weren't cloud-based, you will find yourself trying to sell people what they've already bought.

It's not as simple a decision as you seem to think. The idea that a structure that introduces new ways for things to go wrong is completely risk-free, and all alternatives are "nonsense" is pretty naive, actually.

Re:Anyone that knows anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious to me that you're one of those MBA-types that follows the buzzwords and rushes to embrace whatever the "new" thing is without the slightest thought as to what you are getting yourself into.

Re:Anyone that knows anything...

[Karmashock]

The cloud isn't terminal services. That's a totally different concept.

You say you don't like the term but you're not apparently aware what it means.

Remoting into a virtual machine is not the same thing as the cloud. The cloud amongst other things is almost always a web service. Google documents would be an example.

Windows terminal services is not the same thing.

And terminal services doesn't get rid of your IT department. They're just not as worried about individual systems and stick to the server room more. But you absolutely still need a very competent IT department or the terminal system won't work.

Re:Anyone that knows anything...

[Karmashock]

It's true that most businesses label IT as a cost and in the process ignore how much money IT saves the company every day. The man power they'd have to hire if they couldn't use these systems would be staggering. And instead of acknowledging that point they simply cite the only institution that allows them to make those savings as a cost. What do they want? They want it for free?

IT doesn't cost money. It saves money. Most cost cutting on IT tends to be penny wise and pound foolish in the long run.

That isn't to say you can just blindly dump cash down the hole and expect things to remain efficient. But business managers make a mistake when they label IT as costing money.

you really mean

[Anonymous Coward]

will rely on Mumbai

Sir, I haz no LAN/web access at my desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Just contact the cloud they'll fix it.

But Sir, how c.. -I'll be at a meeting.

And the user will hardly perceive any change...

[Lisias]

... as I never got any kind of help from a Help Desk that effectively gone further than dictating me a Dog =P Damned F.A.Q.

Re:And the user will hardly perceive any change...

[Lisias]

It appears that some moderator is a Desktop Support worker... X-D

Dilbert has it all figured out

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dilbert.com/2012-05-25/

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Cloud%20Computing

How do we make links on this site? There's nothing in FAQ about it.

Re:Dilbert has it all figured out

[_KiTA_]

Standard HTML works. In this case, you're looking for text .

Why Slashdot hasn't migrated to a modern standard such as BBCode is beyond me, but oh well. It is what it is.

Re:Dilbert has it all figured out

[Anonymous Coward]

BBCode is hardly modern - been around for a long time. The only advantage to BBCode is that it's slightly easier to use than HTML. Otherwise it's the same damn thing in principle.

BTW, you seemed to have a boo boo in your own HTML which is funny.

Re:Dilbert has it all figured out

[_KiTA_]

BBCode is hardly modern - been around for a long time. The only advantage to BBCode is that it's slightly easier to use than HTML. Otherwise it's the same damn thing in principle.

BTW, you seemed to have a boo boo in your own HTML which is funny.

Close. I was spacing out the HTML with spaces in between the brackets, which in theory would break it from HTML and make it an example, right? Well, no, the comments system thought it was smarter than I and "fixed" it into that mess above.

Gartner Strikes Again

[RonVNX]

"Desktop support" isn't really about desktops. DUH. It's about users, who won't be going anywhere, and will continue to need to have their hands held for even the most trivial of things.

Maybe "the cloud" will make Gartner go away. The Cloud can do anything right?

Analyst reports are thinly veiled advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

What many people don't realize is that analysts make the majority of their money by selling rights to the 'analysis' and favorable quotes to companies that are subject to the analysis. Give them some money they'll even keynote for you, favorably of course. Want to brief them on your product? That'll be a 'fee' of $x you know to cover 'expenses' etc.

Given enough money you could get Gartner to see a future of mobile data centers powered by clowns on unicycles. Heck forget PUE they'll invent you a new clown based metric.

The only reason they have any perceived value is due to the 'objectivity' they represent, a perception purchased to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from companies marketing funds.

Posting as AC as I am not speaking for my employer who loves analysts.

Re:goose peeking out from within my anus

[Sulphur]

No, you moron, that's a duck.

Thats no duck; thats an insurance company.

Who still has desktop support?

[gelfling]

Seriously. Hasn't everyone already been 'empowered' to fix everything on their own? Help desks haven't been anything more that ticket cutting password resetters for years and years. Oh you have a problem? Yeah let me kick that up to level 2 and maybe they'll get back to you in a week or two.

Re:Who still has desktop support?

[lightknight]

Shhhh, don't spoil the entertainment for the rest of us. It's not often that you get advance notice that a company is going to be failing, let alone in such a splendid way.

Re:goose peeking out from within my anus

[The_Crisis]

Thats no duck; thats an insurance company.

That's no insurance company, that's a space station.

Unlikely...

[Bert64]

Even as more apps are becoming web based, in the short to medium term users will still be accessing them using the same desktops they always have and will still need support for them.

Perhaps long term, users can move to simpler dumb terminals that have less to go wrong and thus require less support. But that's less, not none... Things can still go wrong, one of the primary functions of desktop support is unjamming printers and replacing toner which despite promises of the paperless office won't be going away any time soon.

There will also be a need to debug network level issues, as a dumb terminal is useless without its network...

So sure, desktop support will be reduced but not "wiped out"...

Re:Unlikely...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even as more apps are becoming web based

[citation needed]

The other half..

[scsirob]

Perhaps the article is right that more than half of IT is going into a cloud. That means that almost half will still be in-house, and it is usually that half which requires the IT support staff. It is local, customized applications that need attention. Sure, a word processor can be ran anywhere. But your CRM system will not be so easy to move into the cloud, Regardless of what cloud vendors are trying to tell you.

The IT staff is here to stay.

Re:The other half..

[Anonymous Coward]

...Sure, a word processor can be ran anywhere. But your CRM system will not be so easy to move into the cloud, Regardless of what cloud vendors are trying to tell you.

The IT staff is here to stay.

Ah, given the popularity within the corporate environment of salesforce.com, I'd say your example of a CRM not being "easy" was a poor one. They certainly aren't going anywhere either.

Re:The other half..

[jbolden]

The CRM solution is already on a server running remotely from the desktop. Moving to dumb terminals doesn't eliminate server teams it increases them.

If the printers are in the cloud,

[Marrow]

Do you have to chase your pages around the parking lot as they descend from on high?

False premise

[Vario]

And it's *always* cheaper to in-source [...] You can either do it yourself, or you can pay someone their cost, which could be your cost, plus 20% or more overhead and profit.

I agree that in-sourcing can be cheaper as you do not have to pay for overhead and profit. Your argument relies on one premise, which is completely broken.

Your cost to do something is almost never their cost. So if they can get to the same result with 50% or sometimes far less due to economies of scale adding another 20% is still much cheaper than paying for in-source. Even if you in-source you have to pay for the whole infrastructure. Your email server needs a backup, UPS and staff, whereas the cost of a UPS in a large datacenter is split over millions of users.

Re:False premise

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... I'm going to guess that their benefits package for the worker bees is probably cheaper for them than you'd provide to them if they were in-house. (speaking from experience working as a contractor).

Plus, to your company, the outsourced functionality then becomes an "expense", and thus you can write it off (if you're in the US) or use it to reduce income for tax purposes. The CFO smiles when he sees this.

On one hand, it makes sense. If you have only a small, part-time need for this kind of support, then sure, outsource it if you can't otherwise utilize the people who'd do it in-house.

On the other hand, let's say your outsourcing firm also has some other, whale customers. You thought you were a whale to them (you even got to golf with their CEO who told you as much) until you run into the unsaid brick wall where your emergency does not really register on your "partner"'s radar screen, as they're also dealing with an all-hands issue with Boeing.

Kind of like realizing that your precious important-to-you Kia Speculum car getting broken into or stolen just isn't quite as important to the cops as Phil Knight's Audi A8 having been taken out for a joy ride last night.

good

[Anonymous Coward]

I always found the lame "pc technician" shitbags who work those jobs to be morons.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

That's okay; they say the same thing about all their users.

Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[randomsearch]

There's an awful lot of scepticism on slashdot about the cloud, which is healthy in a way, but I think in general people are hugely underestimating the impact that cloud computing is going to have on IT deployment. It is going to affect us all; software as a service holds huge challenges for the free software movement, some skillsets such as traditional IT support are not going to be as useful, and the way we write software is going to change further.

I'm no cloud zealot, I've just been reading about it a lot and talking to Cloud providers (some large, some medium-sized) and academic experts. I've tried to answer the many points that have been brought up here:

-- "We've been down this road before."

We have, but things *are* different now. Firstly, we have sophisticated and mature virtualisation technologies that allow efficient coresidency and management of VMs. Costs per CPU hour have dropped. Internet access is incredibly pervasive. The "post-PC" era of tablets and smart phones are producing a huge demand for cloud-based storage and services. Does this mean cloud will automatically be successful? No. Does it mean that comparisons with previous era's are not necessarily correct? Yes. If you want another example, tablets didn't 'work' in the past... but now they do.

-- Moving to the cloud won't change anything.

Yes, and no. We will still need IT to manage the cloud services, and engineer bespoke cloud products. Users will still require support. But you're no longer talking about rolling out O/S updates across your company, or installing the latest version of Word. No more capital investment in some server hardware, no more long-term planning of purchases of those servers. If a thin client is broken, you just replace it, and maintaining those thin clients is a hell of a lot easier if they're dumb.

-- Bespoke solution X won't work on the cloud.

No, it won't. But your Exchange server certainly can be moved to the cloud quite easily. In fact, many companies start their move to the cloud with Exchange, and then migrate to live apps... the point is, that you don't have to move *everything* to the cloud in order to make savings and find other benefits.

My advice is, go learn about cloud computing, start looking at the architectures that cloud applications use. Read up on Amazon Web Services and try it out. Take a look at Google App Engine. Read a few books looking at the business case for the cloud before you dismiss it.

RS

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[ErikZ]

I do desktop and software support, let me give you my real world reactions...

Costs per CPU hour have dropped.
We know! We haven't upgraded our computers since 2006, and we're still running everything under Windows XP.

Internet access is incredibly pervasive.
Why can't I connect to the server to fix it? Oh. You firewalled off all internet access.

The "post-PC" era of tablets and smart phones are producing a huge demand for cloud-based storage and services.
Tablets? We won't even get our employees cellphones!

All I see with the cloud is having your software/data on servers no one is willing to be responsible for.

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[Grygus]

I was pretty excited about this concept in 1999. In the interim, there has been no revolution. I'm not saying that one isn't on the verge of happening, but I am saying I'm through trying to predict it. When it comes, I will adapt. Until then, yeah yeah flying cars, of course, sure.

One problem with this idea is that I think many advocates for Cloud computing are making assumptions about infinite resources that are not, in fact, infinite. I don't see a lot of discussion about this problem when cloud computing is brought up.

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I refuse to recommend anything in our biz that has to do with the cloud. We instead our going to switch one of our applications to be web based and rented by the month. I know - web applications are so 90's. How can anyone take "cloud" seriously - you get rain from clouds.

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I have taken a look at AWS and Google App Engine. It just means that lots of internal applications have to be rewritten for the "cloud". Do you even imagine how costly is that?

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[jbolden]

Well thought out comments. I think the big savings that people forget is real estate savings. I suspect cloud will drive IT cost up substantially and unless this is paired with mobile / home / outsourcing it will die.

"We've been down this road before."

You address a bunch of technical problems that mostly didn't stop centralization in earlier generations by analogy. There are two main factors that drive the move towards distribution is the demand for customization and performance/cost. The more centralized a service is the more complex it is. The more complex it is the higher the cost of dealing with edge case features. As those edge case features aren't dealt with rogue alternate systems start getting used. That is how Microsoft beat the mainframes.

The second is that local data and cost. You see this already on mobile devices moving towards local apps and local storage. And the reason is that objective-c is at least 100x less CPU intensive than JavaScript for the same task. Once you move to dumb, all CPU activities are happening on the server and all data is flowing through the network. The edge cases no one thinks about suddenly become the bulk of your traffic and costs.

no more long-term planning of purchases of those servers

That depends if the company is moving to 100% off the shelf cloud solutions or not. If not, they are making long-term planning in funding development and signing long term service contracts.

the point is, that you don't have to move *everything* to the cloud in order to make savings and find other benefits.

Then you are just talking about what stuff goes on which server and of course there are benefits of AWS for some apps. To have what Gartner is talking about everything needs to be off the PC. Local machines to be disposable must be generic.

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

A centralized Exchange infrastructure is a cloud service... the choice is just "private" or "public". Anyone putting their messaging systems in a public cloud get what they deserve: Unhappy users... every network blip will be magnified a 1000x in the eyes of a user.

Re:Time to start taking the Cloud seriously

[strikethree]

"I'm no cloud zealot"

You actually kind of are. Why do NONE of the "cloud" providers ensure that there is no way they can look at your data? Oh sure, they will say the servers are tightly controlled and heavily monitored and there is no way an employee could get at your data, etc etc yadda yada yadda, but none offer to have your data encrypted BEFORE they have control of it. D'oh! Automatic fail.

are they including things like XenApps?

[modmans2ndcoming]

If they include things like the use of Citrix XenApps then I can see a sharp decline...local cloud based application publishing will reduce desktop support to almost nothing... especially if those companies are able to move completely to thin clients.

What'll actually happen

[jht]

A lot of today's internal server support jobs will go away. But there will still be network infrastructure to support (somebody has to manage the switches, firewalls, and access points), there's still going to be desktop support (PEBKAC errors, hardware, and malware), and there will likely be at least some local resources that need to be managed. We won't have a lot of people managing Exchange servers or Active Directory anymore. Or actually we still will - they'll just be working for the cloud providers instead of the client company.

Besides that, this will open up opportunities for outsource support firms (disclaimer: I own a small one). Companies will still need specialized support resources on occasion, just likely not enough to employ a lot of them as staff. They will get that expertise as-needed to supplement what they have in-house.

Re:What'll actually happen

[Lumpy]

Yes and no. Internal server support for companies that dont need security will go away. It will Never go away for companies that need 100% control of all their data.

And some large companies like AT&T will never switch to it, they need control so they can enforce deletion. Because if it's deleted it cant be found with a court order.

I refute it thus (kicks user)

[UncHellMatt]

Bless my users and their black little hearts, desktop support is highly unlikely to ever vanish. Certainly change, certainly remote desktop support (ie gotoassist) will increase, however there will still (likely) be situations where an actual person is going to be needed to go directly to a person and help.

With the increase in mobile computing and potential to see the desktop PC effectively vanish in 20 years (or less!), you will still have people who not only shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a means of communication more complex than smoke signals, and you will still need someone at the ready with a fire extinguisher. The current generation of tech savvy middle school age children will, of course, be part of that next generation of mobile users. However, problems happen. Mobile users will, most likely, still have an office which needs to be set up, which needs to have a person come and assist in problems. They will still need face to face time to help sort out issues, train in the use of a device, and possibly troubleshoot. I have many users who experience abject terror at the prospect of setting up even the most simple minded of USB printers, activating a phone, or even plugging in speakers! Odds are such phobia won't just up and vanish.

There is also a more human element that many people desire when dealing with technical issues. Perhaps we'll see more situations like Apple's genius bar, or *shudder* Geek Squad, taking shape in the business of support. But who knows? At this point, pundits shouldn't attempt to speculate about the IT industry in 2 years, let alone 8 or 20.

Master Control Program or MCP

[bigdogpete]

Need I say more?

Computing generations

[bradley13]

"nobody seems to remember we have been down this road before"

Yes. When I talk to a new class, I often find it useful to draw a spiral showing the development of IT - emphasizing "we have been here before":

• "Big iron" with dumb terminals (pre-1980, centralized computing)
• The first PCs (1980s, decentralized computing)
• Thin clients (1990s, centralized computing)
• Modern PCs (2000s, decentralized computing)
• Cloud services (ca. 2010, centralized computing)
• Mobile computing (coming fast, decentralized computing)

Obviously, each iteration is slightly different than the one before, and there are big overlaps. Still, a spiral going around 3 times captures the spirit of computing history rather nicely. Note also - as so often, the cycle length of 20 years is pretty close to a human generation. Just like each generation thinks it invented sex, each generation thinks it has completely revolutionized computing.

Re:Computing generations

[Anonymous Coward]

My generation invented sex with computers. Wait..wat?

Re:Computing generations

[Sique]

No, fembots and virtual sex you find already in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1920ies. I also remember the 1960ies short story "the revolution of the washing machines" from Stanislaw Lem (I don't know if this one ever was translated to english though, it was published together with the Dzienniki gwiazdowe [Star Diaries]).

Re:Computing generations

[frank_adrian314159]

You forgot the first two spirals, the shift from a corporate-wide central mainframe to department-/branch-located minicomputers in the late sixties to early seventies and the shift from minicomputers to workstation-level systems in the late seventies. Decentralization and re-centralization has been happening for quite a while.

Cloud Resolving PC and Server problems

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to understand how the cloud will resolve computer and server problems... as long as it's a cloud of magical server and computer fixing pixie dust. ;)

One more step to getting rid of the user

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

The dumber the terminal, the fewer hardware faults, OS problems and malware, no? Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :).

And to fix the final problem: get rid of the dumb user. And then nobody will complain about faulty hardware and software. We're heading in that direction anyway. How many researcher jobs have been lost to the Google search box?

Re:One more step to getting rid of the user

[RobertLTux]

the trick is the "monkey" jobs are going away but the higher end jobs (where the PHBs allow it) will stay around.

part of the trick to Google Search is KNOWING WHAT TO GOOGLE

Hardware isn't part of "The Cloud"

[Covalent]

And so long as a computer power supply can fail, a monitor can go bad, or a cable can become disconnected, you will need on-site support.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:Hardware isn't part of "The Cloud"

[ebinrock]

"hrmph! "I didn't get a 'hurrumph' out of that guy" - Blazing Saddles Sorry, you just reminded me of that scene from Blazing Saddles, I couldn't help myself.

Id10T errors

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't fix stupid. Hence Help desk will never be killed. End users will still cause 90% of their own problems which will require a helpdesk to baby sit them.

blogmedia

[Anonymous Coward]

this was due to awareness among users and forums that provide all supports.

Offline users

[zule666]

One thing I haven't seen the "cloud" solve is offline users. I have sales and marketing people that do a lot of work on airplanes, trains, and automobiles. They still need offline access to word processing and email so a dumb terminal or even a tablet based system isn't going to work for those users. Yes you can get a tablet with wifi or cellular data but that isn't 100% reliable while you are traveling. I had an account rep that insisted he needed an iPad, that it would do everything he needed through cloud until I asked him how he was going to work on email with it on the train that didn't have wifi or spotty cell service. He decided to keep his laptop.

Re:Offline users

[Lumpy]

We are trying out the Chrome Books here and That is the issue we are running into. There is a LOT more Offline instances than anyone wants to admit.

We are finding an Ubuntu laptop with Libre Office with thunderbird and dropbox is working far better. It works all the time, and we found that a chromebook uses it nicely and the WWAN cards works well with linux.

Been there done that

[nurb432]

Back when we had terminals we STILL had local support guys.

Going cloud may reduce it, but not eliminate it.

We have also heard this same prediction the last time 'cloud' was tried, tho it was called something different. Same thing, different buzz term.

You are missing one point

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing one point:

most of the users actually working weren't born with Internet, computers, email are going to retired massively in the next years
and they will be replaced by ...
users who ARE connected, own a tablet, a smartphone, are using cloud service, fb etc etc

and those users WON'T NEED IT SUPPORT TO FIX THEIR COMPUTER, they will need it to have the admin pwd.

Re:You are missing one point

[MickyTheIdiot]

This is so wrong. By common sense you'd think it would be right, but that's not true.

I am seeing quite a number of students that want everything and want it NOW and they don't have any concept of what is under the hood of their computers. The percentage of the younger folks that can fix their computers is the exact same percentage of the older folks that can fix their computers.

Re:You are missing one point

[azalin]

Yeah I always liked the power users best. Normal users problems could usually fixed bey tweaking some settings while the "tech savvy" power users usually needed a complete OS reinstall. These are the people who will plug in their own private unsecured hotspot into the company network, because it was easier than to connect their phone this way.
The more you know, the more damage you can cause by not knowing that important little bit more.

Re:You are missing one point

[Voyager529]

I am seeing quite a number of students that want everything and want it NOW and they don't have any concept of what is under the hood of their computers. The percentage of the younger folks that can fix their computers is the exact same percentage of the older folks that can fix their computers.

This.

The problematic difference though is that desktops and laptops are a LOT easier to fix without super specialized tools than cell phones and tablets.

Says those with no clue....

[Lumpy]

If they think Desktop IT support goes away with thin clients........ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sounds like the original article was written by someone that has no clue at all about what IT support is all about.

Re:Says those with no clue....

[MickyTheIdiot]

Such a huge percentage of calls is user error, and that doesn't go away whatever choice you happen to make.

Who are they kidding?

[TraumaFox]

Because "the Cloud" will just run itself, right?

Better to learn networks then

[ebinrock]

That's all the more reason why I intend to learn all I can about networks (and databases, and so on). The end client device may change, but there'll always be a network of some kind.

Cloud Computing?

[VoiceOfSanity]

I don't see our company ever moving into "cloud computing", if simply for the fact that there is no effective security. We deal with data from governments, other companies as well as our own data, much of which must be protected at all times from accidental disclosure. Not only do we have to protect that data, we have to additionally add an additional layer of security to ensure that employees are only able to access data they need for their work duties and not have carte blanche access to anything in the cloud. So while there may be pilot programs to investigate cloud computing, anything would have to be kept internal to the company and not be allowed external access.

In some ways this is no different than distributed computing, thin-client computing and all the other variations of trying to move people away from the desktop and to some virtualized environment. I don't see it happening, as people want their data to be local, their applications to be local and their access to be local.

cloud == server

[Corson]

The "cloud" is just another type of server. The client/server paradigm has always existed in computing. MS Outlook and Lotus Notes are just sophisticated clients. What you are saying is that very thin clients, like the Web browser, will replace current desktop applications. I doubt the Web browser can provide the complex GUI that some of the specialized applications require, particularly if more than text data entry and retrieval is involved.

What-ev-er

[whitelabrat]

Desktop support staff help with the computers, but they really are there to help the users. Cloud computing won't fix stupid. So I'm calling BS on Gartner and their so called experts. Of course the Pointy Hair Bosses will read that and conclude that they can release their support staff from employment.

Virtualization if properly executed may improve workstation security, and consistency, but more likely the managers will try to cheap-out on it and execute spectacular FAIL because performance will be horrible. Then they end up putting workstations back on everyone's desk and hire support staff.

Desktop support a thing of the past....

[cayenne8]

...and in other news, un-employment in India instantly rises 120%....

yeah yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they said this when windows 95 came out....

total bs

[slimordium]

Every time I read one of these doomsday "cloud" stories it pisses me off, as they are not based in reality! Funny waste of space that "story" is...

Cloud Computing Pulllleeze

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree more. Cloud computing & BYOD have INCREASED our support calls not decreased them. Now that 2/3 of the infrastructure and 90% of the application are no longer controlled by the company... nothing has changed on the clients themselves.

No more windows

[currently_awake]

The basic principle of this is to make the software running on your desktop generic (you can use any software, like linux). So long as you have the cloud you don't need to buy/run windows. The down side is no more privacy. Because the government monitors all net traffic (and will require back doors in all cloud servers) and because the gov can't keep secrets you'll have your entire business open to the public.

Mobile Threat

[tunapez]

Came to post your thoughts and to add if the current mobile adoption/migration continues as it has private desktop ownership will take a much larger hit. As the 'Facebook & email' crowd unplugs their malware infested windoze boxes even less of them will be bought new.

It's a trap !

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an extension of the nearly new 21st century business model for Havard MBA's.

As soon as the cloud is too big to fail, then the Gov't bailouts & huge bonuses start.
No one owns the cloud, no one goes to jail..... perfect....

ICL

[Anonymous Coward]

One main 8088 box running CP/M, 6 serial ports and thus the option to connect 6 dumb terminals which got all their data fully from the main unit.

All units could multitask, all units could run CP/M and DOS 1.0 programs, all had a full screen word processor.

It was amazing, it was usable, it was high tech. It was the end for the other 6 people if someone turned off the main computer.

This experience dates back to 1982 while playing with hardware going back to 1975 or so.

Desktopr support will still be alive and kicking

[Pontiac]

Take it from someone who is currently working on a cloud environment..

At the end of the line you still have a user causing you issues.
Keyboards, mice and thin clients will still have issues.
VDI's still have printers to deal with and all the related driver problems.

Executives will still want a fancy laptop to show off to their buddies that needs TLC.
Power users will still declare they need a desktop to do their job.

"The cloud" isn't some magical happy place where IT support isn't needed..
Its just a virtual server infrastructure that may be located somewhere else.
Someone still has to install,monitor, patch, upgrade and support those virtual servers and related apps.
Under all there is a physical server and network infrastructure that needs upgrades and maintenance.

All the same support tasks need to be done.. You just moved them to another office and paid them to do it for you.

What scares me is I hear managers talk of a bring your own device to work system where the user brings the hardware and runs web apps or a VDI session from it. Talk about a desktop support nightmare..

Blasphemy!

[Dareth]

Next you will suggest that end user can *gasp* SHARE printers.

Yet another cycle through the fad

[SoothingMist]

Yeah..... Right. Companies will be eager to turn their IT over to nameless people and big bureaucracies that companies can not hold accountable to support the business' goals and mission. Those who try this will soon find that they are left with nobody to turn to. We went through this with mainframes. We go through it with centralized "service" entities within companies. We turned away from all that because of the lack of accountability and the lack of control over critical assets and services. Do not make the mistake of succumbing to this siren song. You think you will save money but you will not.

Slashdot's worst nightmare...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Slashdot hasn't migrated to a modern standard such as BBCode is beyond me, but oh well. It is what it is.

BBCode would allow users to include all those inline images, emoticons, embedded media player links, etc, which would be an absolute nightmare for Slashdot to police. The meme explosion would become enormous, and the bandwidth and server-side horsepower consumed would increase a few orders of magnitude. That's what Slashdot cannot use a fully-featured forum software, and must roll it's own stripped-down code that conserves bandwidth and server resources.

Re:Slashdot's worst nightmare...

[_KiTA_]

Why Slashdot hasn't migrated to a modern standard such as BBCode is beyond me, but oh well. It is what it is.

BBCode would allow users to include all those inline images, emoticons, embedded media player links, etc, which would be an absolute nightmare for Slashdot to police. The meme explosion would become enormous, and the bandwidth and server-side horsepower consumed would increase a few orders of magnitude. That's what Slashdot cannot use a fully-featured forum software, and must roll it's own stripped-down code that conserves bandwidth and server resources.

Because if we implement a standard, we have to implement the entire standard, right? And there's never been a BBCode enabled board in the history of the Internet that disabled images?

I mean, HTML supports the IMG tag, so therefore anyone can just insert an image or a frame or whatnot into their Slashdot posts.... right?

load of crap

[slashmydots]

Yeeeeah, my current IT setup can't "go out of business" or be taken down by a failed modem or ISP outage. I mean yeah, you get February 29th off by default on some clouds and that's a big perk but I still don't think a "vast majority" are going to the cloud.
But hey, some idiots might look at 1Gbps local speed vs 1Mbps upload speed to offsite databases and files and compare it to the vastly increased ongoing costs of operation on a cloud and say hey, what a great pair! Let's do it!
I know our designers would just love AutoCAD files needing to be downloaded off the internet every time they need to open them and uploading them when they're done. I mean, even our remote-hosted Windows desktops and My Documents (as in they're on a server here in the building) open JPGs for preview a bit too slow for me but if other companies want to tack on even more delay, more power to them and less competition for me when they go out of business.




Ohhhhh, I get it! They'll be going to the cloud and shortly thereafter destroying their entire business because of it. Then they'll shut down and fire everyone, which will reduce available IT support jobs. I see where they're going with that.

Stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the stupidest damn thing I've heard all day.

Relevant quote

[Dancindan84]

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."

– Rich Cook

Programming != desktop support, but the premise still applies. Support will be needed as long as idiots are using computers.

It will just shift

[plopez]

To cloud support from desktop support. Slightly different but still suppport. Now what to call those working support in the cloud. Tech Angles maybe?

Sounds Like Mainframes Are Trying to Comeback

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud computing amounts to another word for mainframes. And seeing so few of them, people prefer the personal computer over a terminal to some cloud server. Besides a decrease of hardware could affect hardware vendor wallets so there is a lot of resistance.

The only use for cloud computing is largely backup storage. And services like Carbonite (which I haven't seen an advertisement for in a while) would be sufficient; however, there are very few security guarantees over having the physical medium to which the data resides in hand.

Cloud computing will never be trusted by me.

The Cloud - Tech industry Experts

[Anonymous Coward]

So, who are these Tech Industry Experts? Seems like most of the real experts are here.... Did Gartner call anyone here? Those are the same "Tech Industry Experts" who thought that OS/2 would be DOS and Windows. I think they're mostly people who read inflight magazines.

Microsoft?

[MarkvW]

Is Gartner a division of Microsoft?

not just down internet speed sucks

[ILongForDarkness]

I know and the internet was broke for 2 hours here. Companies are cheap cheap cheap with internet bandwidth. Perhaps that would change if they were playing on the cloud but I wouldn't count on it. My work for example: 2000 employees in a hospital setting. 20Mbps internet connection and we are a "teaching" hospital (we teach slow students very slowly apparently). Now imagine everyone needing the internet for their word processor, email, pdfs, medical images, browsing, etc. Even "low bandwidth" activities aren't when you have ~600 people at a time all doing it on a 20Mbps connection. One person of those 600 decides to look at a 4D CT set and the network stops for ~50s for everyone. Not good.

There will always be desktop issues...

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

There will always be desktop issues as long as multiple browsers exist for multiple hardware and software (OS) platforms.

Prediction

[tompaulco]

Prediction: 5 years from now, we will have a large movement to get things off of the cloud and back into the hands of local admins. This cycle has been going back and forth for at least 4 decades. All that changes is the buzzword name for the centralization or decentralization process. If you are a consultant that specializes in both directions, you are set for life.

if they had said "hardware support" I might agree

[mbaGeek]

but we will always need desk bunny's

Why this makes sense

[DragonWriter]

Because "the Cloud" will just run itself, right?

Of course not. There will still be physical desktop machines, and they will still require some support.

OTOH, the amount of work involved in desktop administration is greatly reduced when your desktop machine isn't running a lot of software other than an OS and a web browser, and your key apps are all web apps -- whether on local, on-site servers or remotely hosted. "Cloud" (dynamic provisioning of virtual servers) isn't necessarily particularly relevant here, except as a supporting technology for increasing reliance on web apps.

Web apps, of course, require application/server administration, but generally should require less administration per user than desktop apps.

Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it highly unlikely that cloud computing is going to decimate desktops. I know at one point thin clients were supposed to be the wave of the future, Its been years since I (personally) saw a organization/company using one. My workplace uses desktops of varying power and simply connects to one or more files basic file/database servers. The cloud will take over for some things, but most things simply don't work well without a good desktop computer.

Mostly just false cost savings bullshit

[Sycraft-fu]

Our Dean is REALLY big on the idea. He thinks we should get rid of all our instructional labs and just have students bring in laptops. The reason isn't because he's done any good research, but because he doesn't like spending money on the computers for labs, and he probably thinks he could get away with less IT staff.

I actually really like the idea of virtualized desktop infrastructure (a more accurate, less bullshity name than just "the cloud") however it'll cost more, not less, to do it. The servers have to be quite high end and redundant because if they go out, everything is down not just one system. However if done right we could have a setup so people could get at the software they need from anywhere, thin clients in the lab, their computer at home, whatever. It would be very nice for students, and staff too, for that matter. But it would cost more to implement and maintain.

Re:Mostly just false cost savings bullshit

[zlives]

this > "however it'll cost more"
not just from hardware but licensing. so why do it again?

Re:Mostly just false cost savings bullshit

[Sycraft-fu]

Well if I had an unlimited (or at least much larger) budget I'd do it for stability and convenience reasons. A proper VDI setup would be much more stable because everything would run on high end server backends, and have full redundancy. The thin clients are quite cheap so we'd have extras and if one broke down we'd just grab another and slap it in the person's office.

Plus it would be very flexible. You could log in and get your desktop anywhere in the building, or indeed the world. So for the professors that have offices in multiple buildings there would be nothing to roaming their data or anything, because any station you used would be your stuff. Also you can do things like snapshot a user's desktop when you are trying upgrades and so on.

Flexible hardware wise too. So long as the back end is nice and powerful, people can be assigned a lot of resources, and that can be grown on a moment's notice. So if someone was previously just doing Office and web shit, but now needs to do Matlab simulations there's no waiting to upgrade the computer, just reconfig their node on the backend.

I think it would be quite a nice setup. As I said though the cost would be the issue. It would require very powerful quality servers, in a configuration that offered redundancy with failover, a fully redundant network, some very fast, reliable storage, and so on. It would cost far more to do it than what we have on desktops.

If we spent the same as we did on desktops the system would be unreliable without depth, and a failure would take out a large number of people rather than just one. Also net user experience would be worse due to lack of resources for the client instances.

It is a "do it right or don't do it" kind of thing. Do it right, you get a better more flexible environment, at a greater cost. However you don't get cost savings by doing it wrong.

Re:Mostly just false cost savings bullshit

[hairyfish]

It is a "do it right or don't do it" kind of thing. Do it right, you get a better more flexible environment, at a greater cost. However you don't get cost savings by doing it wrong.

We just rolled out a 2500 seat VDI and my advice is don't do it. We did it with unlimited funds and VMware input to 'get it right', and though it works we haven't really achieved anything we didn't already have for all the cost and effort. It costs a *lot* more than regular desktops for hardware and licensing. I'd argue that support costs also go up (don't have numbers yet sorry) because instead of a team of Level 1 helpdesk guys fixing user problems, now we have System, Network and Storage Engineers and Infrastructure Architects investigating user problems. And what do you gain? An easily replaceable/movable virtual desktop? We had that before with pre-imaged spares and laptops.

Re:Mostly just false cost savings bullshit

[Sycraft-fu]

We wont' don't worry, budget is ALWAYS an issue where I work (state university). The main area I'd have interest in it is not staff and faculty computers, though I'd want to try it there, but labs. We have a bunch of instructional labs, many of which run software not available to students to use at home. If I virtualized all of that, then they could run it anywhere. Also it would make it easy to restructure labs for multiple classes. A lab that was normally used for a class that just does light C programming work could be repurposed for a class doing HFSS simulations no problem since they'd just log in to the HFSS VMs (HFSS needs a shit ton of power and memory, not the kind of thing you can afford to buy for every lab).

I'm not sold on it as the One True Way(tm), as should be obvious, but I think it could work well and if we had budget, I'd try it. However we don't, so individual systems it stays. That works just fine, and will keep working just fine.

Try it some time

[Sycraft-fu]

We just moved from "the cloud" exchange to local hosted exchange. This wasn't done on account of "we just felt like it" in fact central IT was very much against the idea. It was done on account of the epic amount of problems we were having. It didn't save on support, it took more support. We had to pay them for support AND have all kinds of on campus support for all the end user problems. Support slowed to a crawl trying to get shit fixed with all the finger pointing.

"The cloud" really just means "outsourcing" and as ever with that, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and it often depends on your size. If you are a 5 man small business, well than ya you have to outsource exchange, too expensive to have it internally. If you have 10,000 people, then it probably doesn't make sense.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be some business who refuse to go to the cloud because of security or reliability concerns.

Also, PHBs like to have someone to call on the carpet, yell at, and fire when fuckups happen. You can't quite do that when your show is run by a faceless corporation like Google; all you can do is seethe quietly, and in some cases quickly take your business elsewhere (to another faceless corporation, like Microsoft)-- and deal with the upheavals that may cause.

My last company learned that lesson well one day in 2010 when Google decided to, without warning and for reasons which were never clear to us, terminate the Postini accounts of a few of our clients who still used it. At the time your only support avenue was filling out and submitting a web form. We did. We marked the ticket "business critical." By that afternoon we had heard nothing back (hadn't even gotten an auto-respond message acknowledging the ticket submission) so we hurriedly switched over those clients to another anti-spam service.

We finally received a response from Google support for our business critical issue, 302 days later. Yes, three hundred and two days. Nearly a year. Adding insult to injury, it was just a canned response apologizing for the delay getting back to us and asking if we were still having the issue.

Group Think

[pkinetics]

CIOs all read the same material, attend the same conferences, and listen to each other. Even more so when the CIO is not a real technology person, but some CFO / CEO / middle manager forced/dropped into the CIO position. The majority do not think for themselves but follow the herd. They will say anything to make it sound like they are on the cutting edge of technology in order to retain their funding and positions / head count.

Oh, Please...

[epp_b]

There will always be idiots asking you, "durrr how do i computer?", no matter where applications and data are stored.

You can’t capitalize it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pure FUD and the reason why? You can’t write off the expense of running your desktops or servers in the cloud. i.e. you can’t capitalize it and if you can’t capitalize then the bean counters don’t like it. This is one simple fact that is always painted over when talking about “Cloud” services.

desktop support jobs will be declining sharply...

[Anonymous Coward]

...thanks to cloud computing?

if that was true, then old style green terminals would have had zero support costs. Far from truth.

Every technology has support costs, even if its mundane things like :
connecting the power plug (for a user who forgot),
switching it on (for a user who forgot),
connecting the keyboard and/or mouse (for a user who forgot),
fixing the dvd player or printer (for a user who needs it right here right now),
setting up access/authorization to application software (in whichever way it works).

So, what is the cloud supposed to do about all that?

Reduced perhaps, wiped out, unlikely

[InspectorGadget1964]

I have worked in the IT industry for over twenty years, mostly for financial organizations, some medium size, some rather large and within those organizations, the idea of having the data (Or applications that somehow manage that data) controlled by a third party is not liked at all. I have also spoken about it with medical and legal professionals and the feeling of distrust is widespread. The problem is not with lack of trust for the technical security of the systems nor with the encryption that could be used to move the data back and forward, but with lack of trust for the human element.

An ITOs wet dream ...

[dgharmon]

In your dreams sunshine .. :)

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm... bullshit... plain and simple.

The bestest mouse trap ever?

[thepacketmaster]

Clearly this time the best mouse trap has been built, unlike all the previous other times that someone built a better mouse trap. From what I've seen in our helpdesk, most of their job is fixing users' screw-ups, like spilling coffee on their devices, unjamming printers, user hardware provisioning, etc. Not much can be done to remove all that physical work.

Re:goose peeking out from within my anus

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the difference between a Duck? The answer is...one of it's legs is both the same.

Is it April 1st Again?

[JonathanPDX]

No matter how hard they try, the need for Desktop Support will NEVER go away.

People are just too stupid/ignorant/lazy/whatever to be able to do without some
sort of hand-holding being available to help them recover from their foibles or simply
to explain that there really is no "Any" key.

Corporate users are no exception.

Seriously?

[Chewieconcarne]

The fools who write these articles should honestly be pretty ashamed of themselves. Seriously, like desktop support is going to ever go away...offices will ALWAYS have the need for someone to be there. There are few exceptions to that rule.

Wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, Gartner does not really know what they are talking about. With the data seized from megaUpload by authorities, even though most of the data on their was legal, and confidential, it is completely in other hands. Many people and companies are beginning to realize that the only way to protect their data is to maintain control over it.

Only fools are using cloud computing.