“The Cloud” (<- as I use both hands making "quotes" in the air) seems to be the newest homonym (two or more words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings)... and, when did clouds start living in computer rooms? I completely understand how all of this "cloud talk" could be confusing. My aim in the next few minutes of your life is to clear the air a bit.

First and foremost you need to know that “The Cloud” has always been. Twenty(ish) years ago, when I attended my first computer courses at DeVry, the “cloud” was in Chicago; while I sat in Columbus. I programmed on terminals that submitted my “job” to the “mainframe” and anxiously awaited my response/printout from the mother-ship. That, in it’s most basic form, was “The Cloud” in the early 1980′s. This form of “cloud computing” supported the decentralized computing model; i.e. – the terminals and central computer were in different geographic locations.

Fast forward to PC’s in business and early LAN’s (Local Area Networks) that brought the power of the cloud locally. The computer that housed “all of the magic” was now called the “File Server”. Now, “terminals” and/or PC’s could access the power of “TheCloud” (which used to be in Chicago or in a Data Center somewhere else far, far away) that was in the same geographic location; no longer was there a need to wait on the mother-ship or traverse expensive Wide Area Network (WAN) links to get to your company’s most valuable asset… it’s data. The power of “The Cloud” is now local… this represents the “centralized” computing model.

Those of us that have been in Information Technology for quite some time have seen this ebb and flow from centralization to decentralization through many cycles. Each time technology changes, businesses are presented with the bill to “migrate to the newest hardware” or “upgrade to the latest version of software”. As a general rule of thumb, hardware upgrades every 9 months or so whereas software is usually double that; every 18 months or so. Businesses generally count on their entire system to last from, on the shy end, 36 months, and on the far end… about 5 years. Business that realize the benefit of their investment for the extra 2 years are often considerably behind their competitors in the technology area. This constant “state of flux” has kept many an IT company in business and given many a businessperson a bad taste for those in our industry; always feeling like they have to hold on to their checkbooks when the IT guys come calling…

While all of this was happening, businesses STILL needed to link all of their offices together. Some with offices just across town, while others were connecting internationally. The use of digital circuits like T1′s and early technologies like Frame Relay were slow but provided “adequate” connectivity… and they weren’t cheap.

That pretty much ends the history lesson. Welcome to modern day computing! I wrote this on my iPad while connected to WiFi that’s connected to a circuit that is over twice as fast as the earliest Local Area Network (10 Mbps Ethernet) and over 15 times faster than a T1!

A bit of fanfare here if you please as we enter the last cycle of decentralization and the modern day version of “The Cloud”!!

The issues business faced in the past need not be issues of concern in the future. The slow, expensive WAN (Wide Area Network) links that were necessary to effectively run one’s business are now more inexpensive than ever and have far surpassed speeds of traditional LAN’s (Local Area Networks). What’s the overall effect of this increase in speed and decrease in cost? “The Cloud”.

It’s now more cost effective than ever to replace your “on premise” solution for the last time. “The Cloud” allows you to have all of your “equipment” (be it virtual or real) in a remotely hosted location that’s as fast (or faster) as when you installed it in the IT closet just down the hall only a few years ago… and if your solution is “virtual” (a whole other topic) your hardware and software upgrades don’t involve:

* Days of downtime while you upgrade the Operating System
* Upgrading memory & hard disks
* Making sure you have at least 3 backup copies of all of your data
* Trusting your IT guys to pull it all off, seamlessly, before the start of the workday, Monday morning (Scary huh?!)

Nope. YOUR upgrades are a phone call to your Cloud Services provider. Conversations concerning a “technology refresh” (upgrade) should now go something like this:

1.). “Would you please increase our disk space?” Sure. It’ll be available in the next hour.
2.). “How quickly can you bring up another server for us?” We’ll have it available for you this afternoon.
3.) “How current are our backups”? We take complete backups of the entire server every four hours, this includes everything from your most recently updated data and software to the cute picture you have on your desktop. If something happens to your system, we can have you back to the point you were a few hours ago… in about 30 minutes or so.

The Cloud provides businesses the opportunity/ability to never have to upgrade their hardware again and avails an easy way to migrate to more powerful systems… all on the fly. Most cloud service providers also guarantee 100% uptime, data backup, and disaster recovery all within the confines of a highly secure physical location driven by multiple power grids, protected by backup generators, firewalls, and “blended” connections to the Internet that are a combination of many different Internet Service Providers (that way if one company’s connection goes down, your business won’t feel a thing!!!).

I’m drawing a line in the sand here. Businesses are soon to realize the safety of centralizing their data in the cloud once and for all… Cloud computing is the last wave of decentralization and the last time a business will need to approve budget dollars for a Capital Expense… nope, this expense can now be moved to Operations Department…

Long live my memories of doing “everything IT” the hard way… as I confidently send praise and success to The Cloud (quotes around this term are no longer necessary – we’re all friends now).

Whether it be Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s Private Cloud, or our very own StoneCloud… this technology is here to stay…

The Cloud is sure to change your life in the near future, if it hasn’t already.. and hec, if given the chance, I’d even vote for the cloud to win Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” award…

You don’t need an iPad. If you have one, it is very likely that you have at least one full PC or Mac in your house that you use on a regular basis in addition to your iPad. There has been a craze as of late that was started by the original iPad last year, for a large flat smart phones. Of course, that is all the iPad and its closes Google rivals are. They take the basis of the smart phone you carry in your pocket, and they make it physically larger. It is easier to use the touchscreen interface when the screen is so much larger. My friend who loves his iPad, often tells me that he loves being able to sit on his couch and pick up his iPad and browse the web or look at email – not that I have ever had any trouble doing that with my laptop. He will begrudgingly admit that it wasn’t that much of a pain to do that with his laptop either. It is just ever so slightly more convenient to do on an iPad.

I am not beating up on the iPad, far from it, it is a very cool little electronic gizmo. However, it does not take long to see some problems with the iPad and its Google counterparts that haven’t been addressed with the latest releases of either platforms. Spend some time crunching numbers, comparing documents, typing, or anything else that requires a lot of interaction and the lack of both a keyboard and multi-tasking become serious issues. I understand Google supports multi-tasking, but moving between running apps is cumbersome and comparing two apps side by side is nearly impossible. That doesn’t even touch on things like printing and file sharing, which aren’t done well natively on either device.

What has happened is that Apple has found a way of separating you from at least $600 for a device that can do nothing more than your laptop. The Google tablets are just as expensive. We are quite quick to forgive the obvious shortcomings of these tablets but we give no leeway to our old business and pleasure partner, the laptop.  The laptop that you can get in a touchscreen, get in Mac, Linux, Windows, and very shortly a Google operating system or any combination of those with the right virtualization software. A laptop that can play, edit, and create music. A computer that is capable of running new and legacy software as well as print from both. A computer that can run 5 different types of browsers that are freely available. A computer that will let you compare a website, an excel document, and your email side by side. A computer that has a keyboard and a mouse. A computer than can do many different things at once and do them all intelligently. I can’t remember the last time that I thought “I wish my laptop was capable of doing xyz” because it can do practically anything that modern computing has to offer. The same cannot be said for any of the current tablet offerings.

If you must know there is a tablet in my household. I bought a $270 Barnes and Noble Nook Color for my wife over the Christmas holiday. She uses it to read books and magazines, browse the web, and play sodoku. Which is very similar to what I have heard people do with the iPad. I like being able to pick up the 7 inch Nook Color to look something up on the Web while I am watching TV. I wish it had an email client, but I can log into Google and my corporate email through the browser. Oddly enough facebook also works in a browser, so I can even update my status on the Nook. Eventually the Nook may be compatible with apps from the google store, under the skin in runs Android 2.1 and there have been rumors of app support coming this summer.

So there it is, I like and use tablets, but I use the regular old computer for most of my needs. I am going to guess most people use the iPad in a similar fashion. I don’t pay a monthly fee (I am looking at you Verizon and ATT) for either my computer or the Nook. The Nook is less than half of most iPads and does 80% of what they can do. For everything else I crack open my still pretty convenient laptop computing machine.

I’ve been wondering if, once the “coolness factor” wears off… I’ll be able to use my new, shiny, 64GB, 3G iPad for something besides impressing my non-computer oriented friends and family… you know… for something… well… “business related”… and now, I think I’ve found it!

I recently purchased the Wyse “Pocket Cloud” iPad app to use for remote controlling our client’s servers… then, I wondered… Could I use the remote session as a jumping point to launch a support session to any/all of our clients…?

Turns out… it works fabulously… if the iPad is doing the controlling… I didn’t spend too much time on using the iPad as the client… every time I attempted that… I ended up getting disconnected… “Controlling” from the iPad, like I said, works great!

Check it out… Click here to watch the video!!

A “PC guy” since their inception… however, I waited in line… the “No Reservation” line to be exact. There were two categories… one line the those die-hard Apple Fans that would be there even if they were unveiling a new “Lisa”, and the other line for the curious and unprepared. I fell into the latter category. My daughter waited with me, and oddly enough, with an equal amount of excitement.

We finally made it inside and found that they’re stock was plentiful. Then, my daughter congratulated me on the purchase of my first Apple computer… Was that really what just happened…? A PC guy just went to the “other side”…? Very possibly so… however, I’m not giving up my ProBook as of yet…

I have to say that I’m very impressed with this device! Its grown on me the last couple of days… but I promise to give it up when I purchase the new 3G version due out later this month.

Out of the box, I was already familiar with the user interface as it’s almost identical to my iPhone. The new LED screen is extremely clear and makes for easy reading and the touch interface is amazingly accurate… An app that I use frequently, the calculator, is missing for some reason… but it’s an easy add for .99 …

While the iPad offers no multi-tasking capability, I didn’t notice that at being a huge drawback… I guess that allows me to focus on one thing at a time… and, when I need to get back to what I was working on previously, it takes less time to get there than the “hourglass” I’m used to on my laptop… The new A4 technology makes this unit is extremely fast!

I found that the Safari browser offered me the Cloud-Based versions of a few applications that I’d previously only been able to access via an iPhone app. Access to our SharePoint site and Online ticketing system was now as easy as browsing to the site and logging in… no need to “have an app for that” anymore! And, as expected, the Safari browser is still, shall I say, “Flash Challenged”.

As you may know, I have less than perfect eyes but love to read. While, the interface of the iBook reader is very cool… the bookstore had less of a selection than I’d expected. I proceeded to install the Kindle app and downloaded a few books. The page-turning action isn’t near as cool on the Kindle reader but they had the book I was looking for…

My connection to our Microsoft Exchange server worked beautifully over my Wi-Fi connection and I absolutely love the new calendaring interface – in both portrait and landscape mode!

I also installed the Microsoft Office equivalent versions from the App Store – “Pages” for Word, “Numbers” for Excel, and “Keynote” for PowerPoint. I expected formatting errors – and there were a few. A few fonts were missing, images shifted from their previous positions, etc. In the “Pages” app I brought up a 27-page .docx document and was pleasantly surprised. Most of the formatting was intact and the application seemed very usable.

The iPad offers tremendous potential for medical applications such as EMR/EHR and will probably pave the way for wide acceptance of tablet-computing. I’m sure I’ll discover a few more features and anomalies in the days and weeks that follow… (assuming I can pry it out of my daughters hands – “Super Monkey Ball” also works flawlessly!)… but, as of now, this is not the death of the laptop… at least not yet…
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