I was fascinated to come across g.ho.st, a fairly well-formed public test of a cloud computing system (if that’s the right word for it!). It attempts to provide a hosted OS with a web-based application suite from Zoho, upload/download and tools to sync to a “real” computer – or FTP as the rest of us would call it. Of course, one can use GoogleDocs or other web based services to virtualise the app and file storage side of it.
So, what does this mean for the corporate IT world?
I’ve been wondering about the general utility of in-house hosted desktop systems such as Citrix’s and Microsoft’s offerings, but always come back to a few key blocking issues:
- If I lose one server, I lose multiple users’ envionments. In a call centre or NOC business unit, that’s a no-no. There are probably resilience options I’m not aware of, but just the headline can be enough to put off a business unit department head
- Mobile users – my company operates in many areas where I can’t guarantee even GSM service, let alone GPRS or faster. So I’m back to laptops (or maybe netbooks….)
- Legacy – I already have hundreds of pretty good laptops and desktops out there, so when exactly do I try to get centralised computing started? Maybe I need a seed project of some kind to get the ball rolling.
- The economy – it looks like I may get a bunch of recent desktop/laptop kit back into stock as the company “rightsizes” (I hate that word). Not a great indicator of a time for capital expenditure to get a hosted desktop model running
Which brings me back to cloud computing. Somehow I can’t see how it’s different from the established offerings, except for the SAAS (software as a service) aspect and it’s not Windows. And it might be cheaper to get started. Oh, and the file storage is out of my control, out of my country with all the data protection issues THAT carries, and I’m reliant upon somebody who I may not even have a formal contractual relationship with to support it and back up my corporate data!
If g.ho.st were to sell their environment for me to run on a hosted server or virtual server in an environment I could rely on, I’d be very interested.
Until then, I’ll use it for my personal use, but I’m running g.ho.st almost entirely via my usual laptop! I’m not sure that was really the idea….