Building an IT Infrastructure Today vs. 10 Years Ago

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 22, 2013 @04:40AM from the more-clouds-baby dept.

rjupstate sends an article comparing how an IT infrastructure would be built today compared to one built a decade ago. "Easily the biggest (and most expensive) task was connecting all the facilities together. Most of the residential facilities had just a couple of PCs in the staff office and one PC for clients to use. Larger programs that shared office space also shared a network resources and server space. There was, however, no connectivity between each site -- something my team resolved with a mix of solutions including site-to-site VPN. This made centralizing all other resources possible and it was the foundation for every other project that we took on. While you could argue this is still a core need today, there's also a compelling argument that it isn't. The residential facilities had very modest computing needs -- entering case notes, maintaining log books, documenting medication adherence, and reviewing or updating treatment plans. It's easy to contemplate these tasks being accomplished completely from a smartphone or tablet rather than a desktop PC." How has your approach (or your IT department's approach) changed in the past ten years?

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Re:You don't build it by Anonymous Coward · 2013-11-22 05:43 · Score: -1, Troll

I'm not sure I get the relationship between Microsoft Azure and the cloud; except in that "cloud" is a badly defined term.
The most fundamental change in the last 10 years is that nobody building serious new systems uses Windows in them. Yes; I know that lots of people are spending plenty of money on Microsoft; there is a huge mixture of legacy systems and incompetents. Sometimes it's difficult to tell which is which (looks like a legacy system but is actually there because an incompetent is unable to migrate off MSSQL to MirandaDB and tells you something about his "specal needs integrity application").
It is not an accident that all the most successful big companies recently; Google; Facebook; Amazon etc. etc. went with Microsoft free architectures. They all came from areas where there were plenty of competitors, but the total freedom to restructure the whole system is what the real "cloud" is about.