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Office 365 Growth Opportunity 'a Lot Bigger Than Anything We've Achieved', Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says (cnbc.com)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday suggested that Microsoft could grow more from its Office 365 line of cloud productivity apps than anything in the company's 43-year history. From a report: With business editions of Office 365, Microsoft faces competition from Google, as well as younger players like Box and Dropbox, in the race to get companies collaborating in apps running on remote cloud servers. "The growth opportunity for what is Office 365 is a lot bigger than anything we've achieved, even with our high penetration in the client-server world," Nadella said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco. When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss at the event. Microsoft recently introduced the Microsoft 365 bundle, which includes Office as well as Windows, along with enterprise security and mobility services. Nadella also talked up the company's potential in the Azure public cloud infrastructure business, where it competes with Google as well as Amazon Web Services. "We had a good business in our server business, but this business is orders of magnitude bigger than what used to be a successful server business," he said.
This is truly an excellent opportunity to make money off of charging people a monthly fee for what used to be a fairly affordable one-time purchase. Sad that the big thing Microsoft is pumped about is a stale word processor and spreadsheet package. Satya's idea of innovation is a payment plan almost nobody actually likes.
We used to be engineers during the early days of Slashdot. We have all now been promoted to the management.
I'm still trying to figure out the benefits of storing your data on multiple servers that you have no control over, and no idea where exactly they are. When you delete a file from the cloud, is it actually properly deleted? If the cloud is attacked, how long will it take for the parent company to admit they were hacked? I like the concept of cloud storage, but I have 0 trust or faith in that system at all.
We are starting to use Azure. We have an E5 license for ~5000 seats of Office 365, including OneDrive and Skype for Business. Given all of that, I am a bit biased. Also for full disclosure, we are building out a hybrid cloud with Azure to augment our four data centers (2 in the US, 1 in the UK, 1 in Dubai). I have also been doing IT for 20 years, so I have seen some trends come and go.
This whole FUD about "don't trust the cloud with your data" is getting REALLY old. Microsoft (and AWS) have more redundancy and security built into their infrastructure that you could ever hope to build into a private setup. I say this as someone who is managing close to 4 PB of data being remote replicated via SRDF (for our EMC gear) and array based replication (for the Pure stuff).
By the end of next year, we will have moved the majority of our remote office file server data into OneDrive and MS Teams. We are going to be able to save huge amounts of money by not having to buy Data Domain hardware to replicate back to our core data centers, and we are going to get better reliability, versioning and recovery options.
I trust Microsoft's security team of hundreds of engineers, analysts and support staff more than I trust the half dozen guys in house. And I say this as someone who has been interested in, and responsible for computer security since the mid-90s. There is no way that a small SOC at a mid-sized corporation can hold a candle to a 24x7 global operation like Microsoft (or Amazon). It just is not going to happen.
While we still run a lot of our applications in house, we are using Azure for development and proof of concept work. When you look at the costs of enterprise class storage with all of the compliance boxes checked (at rest encryption, remote replication, etc.) there is no way that we can provide storage in a cost competitive way to the business.
Our clients are slowly coming around to trusting the cloud as well. We work with heavy regulated industries including financial services and healthcare. We have a lot of sensitive data on our networks. But as our clients shift their own workloads to the cloud (I hate that term), they are becoming more permissive of allowing us to move the data that we host for them there as well.
I think that in 10 years from now, the only companies that are going to still be hosting their own infrastructure are going to be big banks, tech and manufacturing firms that are still building things and need strict controls over their IP. Other than that, the costs of paying other people to run infrastructure for you are just too compelling. There is no way to stay competitive with that.