By: Dan Bremner
I've been thinking a lot lately about reframing - the idea of changing your perspective in order to see something in a completely different light. It struck me that often when we look at something brand new, we see it through the lens of our experience with the old thing that is being replaced.
Create a Car, not a Mechanized Horse
Before the invention of the automobile, some inventors were trying to create a mechanical horse. Of course, we look at that now as both laughable and horribly inefficient. (I suspect many people back then did, too.) But assuming they had succeeded in their design, nothing would prevent a mechanical horse from pulling a coach and getting you to your destination.
I look at some attempts at taking advantage of cloud computing in the same light. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. It's as true in cloud computing as anywhere.
Servers Required, or Just Services?
In the "traditional" world of IT, we are conditioned to use servers to deliver services to our user community. We have file servers, print servers, Active Directory servers, email servers, remote desktop servers, application servers, database servers, web servers, and so on. In the cloud, we can use a service like Azure to spin up cloud "servers" to run workloads that may have formerly been handled by on-premises servers. But that isn't always the best way to do things.
An obvious example is email. It makes little sense to set up an Exchange server in Azure to provide email services. Clearly, it's far easier and more cost-effective to subscribe to email through Office 365, and - importantly - the end-user experience is nearly identical. But what about other services? It's tempting to try to replicate the server architecture of a "traditional" solution in the cloud, and sometimes it's necessary, but it may not be the best way to go about it.
Different Path, Same Destination
For example, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business work a bit differently than a file server does, but maybe the idea of Team Sites and Team Document Libraries, organized around Groups, is a concept that would work better for a business. Especially if your current "shared drive" has become a disheveled repository filled with no-longer-needed files, you may be challenged to rethink your process and the organization of your data as part of a cloud migration. That effort may yield unexpected benefit to your business. Provided of course, that thought is put into the design, and that time is spent to train the users on how the new system works, and what it can do better than the "old way" of doing things.
With the speed that services are updating and features are being added to both Azure and Office 365, companies should definitely evaluate whether it's better to change the way they do things a little bit. Increasingly I predict we will see more services offered directly as services, eliminating the need to spin up a server. Azure Active Directory is an example that's moving in that direction, to where it won't always be necessary to have a Domain Controller server to benefit from the centralized authentication and security benefits of Active Directory. SQL Server is available now as a cloud service for developers, though most off-the-shelf programs that use SQL Server on a Windows platform would not be compatible with it. Similarly, if a business is thinking about a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) just for one application, it makes sense to at least investigate whether it's worth switching to a cloud-enabled version of (or alternative to) that application.
Great Chance to Rethink "The Way It's Always Been Done"
Not every business can move their computing operations completely into the cloud, nor is it necessary to go "all -in." Hybrid approaches work well, too. But anyone interested in "going to the cloud" will find a lot of options, especially if they're willing to reframe the way they look at their own processes. In doing so, they may discover better ways to do old things, and seize the opportunity to do things they never could have done before. I would encourage anyone moving to a new platform to embrace the new possibilities, not just try to replicate exactly what they had on the old platform. A bit of time spent on process redesign could benefit your company for years to come. Don't just mechanize your horses, design a sleek new automobile.
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