Simon May, IT Pro Evangelist Microsoft

Embracing consumerisation is strategic not tactical

2012-05-28T13:41:28Z

I keep seeing lots post, blogs and articles about how IT needs to move to a more nimble and responsive view. It’s impossible to argue that the business and IT need to be in lockstep but it feels like most people see businesses as being two steps ahead. If I look around this seems to be due to a lack of strategic rethink on a regular basis and despite the promise the decision makers I talk to are about to do the same thing with BYOD.

I’m from a large enterprise background where every year the strategic decision makers who have to balance architecture concerns, security concerns, business requirements and budget think 5 years ahead. They take a snapshot of the world, plan for it continuing, start implementing the changes, then cycle again in 12 months time. This is what’s started leading to the missteps with the business. It’s a world where fixing a strategic misstep takes 6 years.

That’s no longer good enough, 6 years ago we didn’t have capable, small, light, near disposable tablet devices.

Strategic thinking in IT needs to change from precise technical strategy to directional technical strategy. Particularly with regards to endpoint strategy. The biggest strategic imperative today should be to move towards an “Access point” strategy where you aren’t thinking about deploying (just) a locked down desktop, (just) a corporate owned and operated mobile device or even enabling just BYOD it should be an “Access from anything, anywhere, anytime” strategy.

With an AAA strategy the variables are more fluid but the concerns are the same, security,reliability and availability. The decisions on how to deliver upon those concerns are tactical and tactics change. BYOD is a tactic, not a strategy as it’s too tied to a single premise – the device.

I wonder if this is a change we’ll start to see? Arguably IT only do those 3 things, security, reliability and availability…but can they do them better than everyone else the business has access to?

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Simple model for approaching BYOD

2012-05-15T09:32:40Z

For some time I’ve been trying to work out with colleagues how to articulate what I see as a solid model for dealing with consumerisation of IT in the workplace or even allowing people to bring their own devices. It’s quite tough to find some mental model to help people to understand the kind of approaches that work. I’m looking for a way to help you manage more than the standard IT desktop, to make more sense of productivity at work and with a view of IT security risks.

The key is balancing the approach: do more with less, more permissive access to less secure stuff. Most of an organisations “stuff” tends to require less security than IT think. Be a guide not a gate keeper.

Good, Better, Best, seems to be the most applicable that I’ve found.

GOOD is most open, your users being able to access your network, get IP addresses, get to some apps / services / data. They probably have to keep entering credentials and they may be storing those credentials on their device.

BETTER is having some modicum of remediation over the device – the ability to remote wipe it for example.

BEST is having an authenticated connection with general purpose security (you could say domain joined PC)

N+1 is having the ability to ensure end to end security, encrypted device, encrypted communications, rights managed documents, remote wipe, policy based management, policy based enforcement.

Not all devices will fit into all categories, in-fact probably only Domain joined Windows PCs will be able to enter the N+1 category (that’s because all the things mentioned are built in from the ground up). That said most people probably don’t need everything in the N+1 category. Most organisations will also see their users adding GOOD and BETTER devices to their mobile worker armoury along with a BEST or N+1 devices.

A further note on N+1 is that this is where I see private cloud hosted apps and desktops and there is no reason that a GOOD, BETTER or BEST device can’t be used to access an N+1 hosted app or desktop.

*caveat: this is a simple model, there will be many exceptions, the key is mixture.

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Technology to Support Consumerisation: IPSec

2012-05-08T15:55:58Z

A technology that’s been around for quite some time is IPSec, it helps to ensure security of communications between two network devices. With IPSec in place two devices need to establish a peer-to-peer trust before communication can take place, it’s kind of like having a secret handshake.

If your enabling an environment where people will be able to bring their own device you probably have some requirement to prevent them accessing some services, such as the HR system, so that they don’t walk off with the CEOs pay slip. IPSec is perfect in this situation to preform something called Server and Domain Isolation. Essentially this means that only specific devices can access the super-secret servers but every device can have broad network access.

Accesses to services and resources is somewhere that an 80/20 rule applies. Most people need access to most of the network for most of their work, some people will need access to the other 20%. Using SDI and IPSec you can require people to access secure information from devices you consider to be more trustworthy. Perhaps they can’t access the HR System from their Windows Phone but they can from their Windows Laptop, that’s BitLocker encrypted etc.

IPSec is implemented in Server 2008R2 and Windows 7 using Group Policy controls for Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Essentially you place your super-secure resources into a group or OU that REQUIRES access and place clients that you are happy to have access to those resources into a group or OU that set things up so that clients will reply correctly if asked to do the secret handshake. If the client doesn’t know the secret handshake that’s the end of the conversation. Whilst you’re at it you can raise the general security level on your network by telling all clients to REQUEST access. That way the first thing the client will say is “do you know the secret handshake” if the answer is no they can still talk to each other.

For Windows everything is controlled through Group Policy, so not only is it easy to administer it’s easy to get very granular, for example you could say that only clients that match a specific WMI query get the IPSec policy’s applied.

If you’re wondering why you wouldn’t just do this with some app level access control or some file level access control then consider this: you don’t know what’s running in the background maliciously on any device that someone casually brings in.

RESOURCES for IPSec and SDI have been gathered together in one place already on this IPSec Page of TechNet but I thoroughly recommend the following:

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Test Lab Guides for Consumerisation (BYOD etc.)

2012-05-01T14:24:25Z

If you’re thinking about how you can make your environment more suitable for a world where people want to bring their own devices into the office then you could do well to attend an IT Camp where we talk about just that. Of course those events are now full, so I won’t bother to link them but now you can build the lab at home.

We’ve just released the Test Lab Guide that is part of the basis for the stuff we show at a camp, download, evaluate and have fun.

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Embracing consumerisation: It’s all about the journey

2012-04-19T15:56:12Z

In my last two posts I talked about People + Devices and Data + Apps – essentially 4 of the things you need to manage and probably already are in your environment. A fourth element is the network but I won’t be going into that in particular because it’s purely a means to an end, a way for People to connect the apps on their devices to the data that they need to be productive. What “client infrastructure managers” now need to do though is to combine those essential elements into the users journey and how to manage that journey not just the individual items.

Consider the scenario (one you’ll see at IT Camps): Ben is working on a document on his laptop, he needs to share it with Alice who needs to approve the content. Ben then has to go to the coffee shop but he doesn’t want to carry the weight of his laptop for a quick coffee so he just takes his slate. Whilst he’s out he realises he needs to amend the document, so he connects back to the place he shared it with Alice and makes the changes – whilst she’s actually reviewing it. Then he starts a new document, but he has to run so he just powers off. When he gets back to his laptop in the office the document is “magically” there. When he’s done for the day he packs away his laptop and locks it in his desk drawer but just before he gets out the door Don asks him to share the new document with him, so he jumps onto Don’s PC and does just that – even though he only saved the document on his desktop over on his laptop, which is locked in his desk drawer.

Some of what just happened might sound like magic. It’s not, it’s all possible with existing tools and the right deployments of User State Virtualisation, SharePoint, DirectAccess and some other established tech. All IT did was provide the means to make it happen – put some glue in place that allowed for a mixed device style.

Really it’s always been the job of IT to make technology work in the most approachable, appropriate way.

The next paragraph is the same as the story above but with the bit’s of tech marked out so you can see where we used them.

Ben is working on a document [Word 2010] on his laptop, he needs to share it [SharePoint 2010]with Alice who needs to approve the content. Ben then has to go to the coffee shop but he doesn’t want to carry the weight of his laptop for a quick coffee so he just takes his slate [Windows 7]. Whilst he’s out he realises he needs to amend the document [Word 2010], so he opens the place he shared it [DirectAccess + SharePoint 2010]with Alice and makes the changes – whilst she’s actually reviewing it from the browser [Office Web Apps]. Then he starts a new document, but he has to run so he just powers off. When he gets back to his laptop in the office the document is “magically” there [User State Virtualization]. When he’s done for the day he packs away his laptop and locks it in his desk drawer but just before he gets out the door Don asks him to share the new document with him[User State Virtualization], so he jumps onto Don’s PC [Remote Desktop Services] and does just that – even though he only saved the document on his desktop back his laptop[and on the server], which is locked in his desk drawer.

So it’s all about the journey or rather planning for the journeys that your users might make and whilst you can’t plan them all, you’ll find plenty of commonality.

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Embracing Consumerisation: Data and Apps

2012-04-17T11:54:46Z

My last post was about how, in order to embrace consumerisation, you need to start thinking in terms of managing the access that people and devices have, or more accurately the access that People on Devices have. This post is an extension of that previous post in that we’re going to start thinking about the two other of the four ingredients in our consumerisation cocktail that represent the things that people want to access.

Other than admins no person should ever have to think about accessing a server, they shouldn’t need to be thinking – “golly gosh I need to access the latest sales data so I need to go to \\sales\2012\march\week3\some-random-share\sales.xls”. In fact no person ever really wants to have to remember that, they just want to access the sales information. More over they really don’t need to be thinking, “what credentials were they, umm, lets try this, no, how about this, no err, how about…”. People just want access to information.

OK, it’s not that simple, they do need a way to access that information but we can see a marked shift here too in resent times. Today people think in terms of Apps, services have become apps – just pick up the mobile device nearest you and the proof is instantly visible. There are also really only two types of Apps too: Viewing and Doing. The former category, Viewing, are in fact ways to consume information and the latter so they fall into our information category, Doing, are generally ways to create information. It’s hard to cite a single example of anything other than these two.(You could argue that there’s a 3rd type, Games, but that’s about it).

What we need to do when we consider how to allow a more consumerised environment – whilst also protecting our corporate assets – to control who has access to Do what with Information. Nothing new, it’s a problem we’ve had for many years and we have a wealth of well known solutions, but do they stack up in this brave new world?

Old solutions, new problems

Today what many organisations are doing is using the same old solutions, that were perfectly good in the past, applied to todays problems and they’re being effective some of the time – but not all. The old way to manage information was to manage who had access to it where it rested, on the server, but the trouble with that approach is that the information is no longer at rest, it’s constantly moving and through many applications, devices and people. How do we cope?

To give you an example, what happens when your CFO emails the financial accounts to his home PC because it’s more convenient. The chances are that the information is only protected at rest, so when it’s attached to an email that protection (the file system ACL) is removed, it then goes over a HTTPS (good) connection to the email provider (who could then read it at will) then it lands on his mobile device…or rather it wood if he’d sent it to the correct email address, instead it lands on JoeBloggs@contoso.com ‘s device not Joe.Bloggs@contos.com ‘s email inbox.

The best idea is to manage the information assuming it’s mobile, assuming that it will leave the confides of the firewall, essentially assuming the worst case will happen.

In a modern environment where employees can use their own devices and you might not have access to control those devices your best approach is to manage the information in a way that never leaves the information. To embed security into the information.

Rights management comes of age

We’ve had a technology built into Microsoft Office documents, built into Microsoft Exchange and built into Windows for quite some time to manage this issue but now is the time to turn it on. Rights Management is built on the requirement that the App that is opening the information (the document, the email) will check to see what the person opening the document can do. The App does this by requesting that information from Active Directory Directory Services, normally this only happens if the device is allowed to request that information. As such you have a mechanism to ensure that the right person can access the information from a device or App that’s secure enough to store the information.

You might well notice that again, the two variables of management you have remain People and Devices.

A second thought might well be that you need some kind of rich client software (Microsoft Outlook 2010, Microsoft Word 2010) in order to ascertain the rights that the user has over the information. Apps of course don’t have to be delivered on a device, they can be delivered as a Web App and AD-RMS works with Office Web Apps. Web Apps of course play an important part in the mix. With Web Apps you have a way to reduce the potential for data walkabouts because with a web app your data doesn’t need to leave your firewall – even though it’s displayed through a web portal outside your firewall.

Access to apps

Apps probably cost money and as such you will probably want to protect access to apps not primarily to prevent access to information but to prevent you from overspending. Controlling access to apps is a fairly simple process but it’s something we’ve done a great job of automating in System Center Config Manager 2012 – which is a future post all of it’s own. The key thing to remember though is that SCCM 2012 implements and user self service request mechanism and administrator approval mechanism for application installs, in addition to admin driven installations. Essentially you get a corporate Store for Apps – and people are comfortable with that these days, just look at your mobile device.

Key things to remember about information and apps

Control access to information at rest and in motion based on People and Devices and try to control access to apps to manage cost not information – after all what would you do if the user brought their own app?

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Embracing consumerisation: People and Devices

2012-03-07T06:40:36Z

In the past I’ve written a number of articles on how to start thinking about the consumerisation of IT – if you aren’t familiar with the term hopefully this link will help. Now I think it’s time to move beyond thinking about how you’ll build a consumerisation strategy and how your support will change and start looking at the tech that you’ll need to support a flexible environment. In this post we’ll take a look at the two major variables, People and Devices, and look at the types of tech to help support more variability in them.

There are two variable user-centric components that you use to control access in your organisation, the identity of your people and the identity of your devices. If you’re like most IT shops you’ve had your eye on these for a long time and have probably locked things down around these two things. First and foremost your people have become user accounts and this is where your access controls are probably currently more focused. Secondly you have control of devices because they’re corporate issued assets, you named them, you have admin access, you say what software is installed and what isn’t, you have to fix them when they break. We’ll spend most of our time in this post discussing devices.

Devices

The first thing to note is term I’m using – I’m not saying desktop, I’m specifically being more inclusive than that. Devices includes desktops, laptops, mobile phones, smart phones, embedded devices (you might have Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS or tills to everyone not in retail). It really doesn’t matter what the device is, people have so many today (device multiplicity) that you need to think about how to best support them all.

Traditionally we controlled devices in a binary, red and green way – you either have a corporate one or not, allow or deny. Today though people will try to bring in what they want and they love those devices so much that they will fight to make them work on the network, and when they do they break some kind of corporate policy. If we think about the Windows environment that we all have devices have identity – an account in active directory and it’s that identity that allows us to ~~control~~ secure and support them.

What we need to aim for then is a world in which we have as much knowledge about the devices on our network as we can, given the devices constraints. For example you can’t domain join an Android device. The upshot is that you can’t ~~control~~ secure and support it using the traditional methods of Group Policy etc. but the only reason you can’t is because there isn’t an account there. Most people know that the majority of mobile devices connect to our corporate network using Exchange Active Sync so that they can receive their email. There for the management connector for mobile devices – the thing that knows what that device is – is the email system.

Of course devices don’t receive email….people do. So what we really know here is some information about the device based on the person, not just the device. Given that a device does things without the person using it knowing necessarily (I’m thinking looking for resources but malware could also be a problem) don’t we need to think in pure device terms? Yes

What we need then is a lower level identifier than just the individuals identity, perhaps we consider the devices identity as it presents itself to the network.

At the network level we can see the devices MAC address first, then it’s IP Address (which we give it probably) then once meaningful communication is established we can ask for certificates, identity attributes, capability profiles and the like. Of course we need to enable the right components. It sounds obvious but the best way to support devices you have no control over is to ask them what capabilities they have and respond to that.

People

Managing people is far easier than managing devices because what we need to do here is long established. Essentially we manage what an individual is allowed to see, and do from both an information (data) and resource perspective. Normally we manage both based on Access Control Lists or permissions and on Privilege. Dave has READ access, Donna has WRITE access, Helen is DENIED access. Simple.

We are able to do this because people have a user account on the system they need access to and the really sensible shops have already introduced and enforce a single identity or at least Single Sign On. If you don’t this is your starting point.

People on Devices

The tricky considerations come into play when we use both variables together, P + D = x , and this is where the challenge for us comes in as IT Professionals. We need to build an environment that responds to this.

If Dave has access to the company accounts on his work PC (which is a fully managed, encrypted, asset) and he has the same level of access from his very beautiful mobile phone, what happens if his devices are stolen? First thing you do to respond is change is disable his user account and change his password. Second you know his work PC is encrypted so you classify that a low risk of loss. Then you turn to his mobile – it might be encrypted, it might not, perhaps just the mail box, not the app storage, did he sync the files to a public cloud location, can it be remote wiped, yes, is it switched on, is the SIM card still in the device? Questions pop up thick and fast. All I’m getting at is that you need to take into account not only the person, but the device that the person is using.

P + D = x

What a person can do on device A might need to be different to what they can do on device B, C and D so we need an infrastructure that can help manage that.

Some tech…

To secure & manage people on devices you might like to look at using:

Active Directory
Exchange Active Sync
System Center Configuration Management 2012
IPSec policies to control access to your most secure resources
Network Access Protection – to ensure minimum standards
A modern gateway – to present secure web access to internal resources
Firewalls (!)
RemRemote Desktops and VDI – to provide a consistent fall back environment, or secure remote access
VPNs or (better) DirectAccess
App-V – to deliver virtual applications so that you can remove them easily when no longer needed

For most this should be a familiar and not so scary list of technology. Deployed in a flexible way you won’t loose control but you’ll allow people in your organisation to do what they want – which sounds like too good to be true marketing fluff…but it’s not.

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Data Centre World #dcwexpo

2012-03-07T05:22:51Z

Yesterday Andrew and I had some fun walking around Data Centre World Expo at Olympia in London. What we were looking at were hundreds of stands of the kit that you use to run a data centre, the plant, the cooling, flooring the wiring all the really tangible stuff. We had a 35 minute slot in which to talk about the way that Microsoft does data centres and how big we go. A couple of folks asked us to post the deck we used and the details that we shared along with places to find out more. Here you go….

Linkage

We mentioned MVA which is the place for FREE training for your IT People in our cloud stuff

…and we mentioned our blogs, but you’re there now, so I’d also suggest checking out this post from a short while ago on Microsoft Data Centre security.

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Why you need to know about “consumerisation” of IT

2012-02-24T14:17:40Z

One of the biggest challenges facing the CIO at the moment is the consumerisation of IT but I’m aware that may be a term that is meaningless to most in the IT department. Perhaps it’s better explained by the term Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) which is normally enough to send an icy shiver through the heart of many a desktop or security admin. Essentially consumerisation is the idea that your users are now driving your organisation’s technology adoption, especially in the device space. You’ve probably come across and are trying to ~~block~~ deal with people using their iDroid devices to do stuff (or your just ignoring it hoping it will go away ~~like your job~~).

Of course you might be looking to actually embrace it so that you can take advantage of the cost savings, flexibility improvements and the like that it can bring, if done right. Alternatively you might think you’ve got it 100% sewn up and no-one can bring anything interesting in, and you have 0% chance of data leakage.

If you fall into the first camp then you’ll be looking at ways to manage device multiplicity*, to secure access to servers, to secure your data and it’s portability, to deliver applications seamlessly to users no-matter where they are. If you’re in the latter then what’s the chances you missed something?

*credit to @markwilsonit for coming up with that one

A better way

It’s become fairly clear that things have changed I think. It’s quite common that people want to use devices that aren’t corporate issued and as such you have to ask if they’re getting onto your network and then you have to ask if you can trust your own network? If they are using their own devices are they copying down email, how’s the encryption on that device, what do you do if it’s nicked, what if there’s no signal to remote wipe the device? If they’re bringing in their own PCs (which is the the most common consumer device for Bring Your Own – their own laptop) what controls do you have?

We see that there’s a better way with this issue. You build a network that responds to what’s happening, where devices have to meet specific criteria in order to access the more secure data in your organisation. Where the data itself is protected so that you can’t just copy it somewhere insecure and have it leak. Where applications are available to people in your org where they need to access the application. Where application access is device appropriate so you don’t have to wait for a full install on a device that isn’t your main one. Where remote access doesn’t require the user to do something different to when they’re in the office. Where working anywhere is normal. I think you get the picture.

A quick way to see the big picture, all together

We’ve got a whole host of technology that enables an environment like this, so let the acronyms commence:

App-V, RDS, SCCM2012, Exchange, AES, Office 365, Lync,AD-RMS, AD, DirectAccess, NAP, Modern Gateways, DHCP, IP-SEC

So in this selection of camp events we have a series of events to help you not only see the above but learn how it works. Camps are little different to other types of events, you lead the content and we don’t use (much) PowerPoint, it’s all based around us building the environment in the room – and by us I mean you get some hands on time. We’ll also be white boarding and thinking about what it takes to build a BYOD style policy, helping you identify some gotchas. It’s not your typical day of training – or some sales based demo.

Here are some links to some of the writing I’ve done on consumerisation over the last year or so, so that you can get the picture…

How the consumerisation of IT affects IT departments

How do you support consumerisation of IT

Building your consumerisation of IT strategy (part 1 of 2)

Building your consumerisation of IT strategy (part 2 of 2)

5 Imperatives for modern IT departments

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Talking about App Compat and Internet Explorer today with Quest

2012-02-21T20:46:43Z

Today I presented at a seminar with Quest around IE migrations and compatibility. Many people asked for the deck, so here it is.

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Error: Hyper-v launch aborted due to auto-launch being disabled in the registry

2012-02-15T21:13:13Z

Wow this one blindsided me this evening. I’ve just replaced the tiny 500gb drive in my main demo laptop with a shiny new 1TB one (I have a lot of VMs you know) and got hit with this error. Basically what I did to replace the drive was use the free software from Acronis that came as a download with my new Western Digital drive to clone my 500gb drive onto my 1TB drive, standard stuff. Having done that and trying to boot I got some lovely messages as as a result of doing boot to VHD and the the BCD no longer being able to find the files (because settings in the BCD had obviously changed) to fix that I ran some simple commands:

diskpart

select vdisk e:\myvhd.vhd

attach vdisk

bcdboot <mounted vhd letter>\<vhdname.vhd>

And repeated for each of my bootable OSes. All was good the OSes were working, but when I got into Windows Server 2008 R2 I couldn’t start any VMs….a quick look at the System Event Log revield the error

Hyper-v launch aborted due to auto-launch being disabled in the registry

And a quick Bing brought up this excellent article from SBSFaq.com so I needed some more commands to enable Hyper-V which doesn’t happen automagically.

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Finally I was done and my machine was back to normal. Error fixed.

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How many times a day do you use Windows?

2012-01-09T06:24:06Z

Using Windows is something that most of us do every day, but you probably don’t realise just how much. A friend sent me this internal video that shows a “day in the life” of an average chap and just how many times he comes across a Windows device, be it embedded or other wise. Very nice, very simple….I really didn’t realise the Vacuum cleaner shown ran Windows….

How many times do you use Windows?

Oh and for those who don’t know…SCCM 2012 can now manage many of these devices

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What does the future look like

2011-11-17T17:06:49Z

Yesterday I did a turn for a great group of CTOs associated to a variety of hedge funds. As promised here is my deck from the day.

The Future of IT

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Nominated for a CW Social Media Award

2011-12-07T11:59:40Z

For a Computer Weekly Social Media Award…

Which is kind of cool and I’d really appreciate you taking 5 minutes (probably less) to vote here for Simon-May.com which is listed in the IT Professional section, although I’d also like you to vote for Rich.

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The Future

2012-03-07T05:24:07Z

I quite often get asked to talk about what the future will be like and this video is excellent, it shows lots of augmented reality and the like but what really inspires me is the context computing you throughout. Switch context, switch interface.

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IE9 is secure, managed and trusted for your organisation

2012-03-07T05:24:22Z

In this world concerned with consumerised IT where almost everyone is familiar with using a browser of some description and many are bombarded by messages about how “fast” the internet can be if you use browser X, it really is important to…(read more)

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Still on XP? Why you should be browsing with IE8

2012-03-07T05:24:44Z

There are plenty of people out there still using Windows XP, however many parts of the operating system have needed to be updated in order to keep things going. There have been three service packs released for Windows XP since it’s inception and…(read more)

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Get your free conference here

2011-09-29T08:30:00Z

This one-day online conference features a range of sessions specially tailored for IT Pros and covering the big challenges for the year ahead.

Join Microsoft experts plus professionals from IT departments around the UK to discuss topics such as how we will embrace the influx of consumer devices into the workplace; the new features available through SQL Server Denali; and how Windows Azure can help you make sense of your Cloud offering. I’m really excited by this conference as we’re going to be using some great Microsoft Valued Professionals and some of our UK technical community who are really on the tools to share their experience.

The conference will be presented through LiveMeeting, and throughout the sessions you’ll be able to interact and pose your questions on the topics.

Date & Time – 27 October 2011, 09:00-16:00

Registration & Detailed Agenda – WWE

Further Information – TechNet Blog

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Me, talking cloud, in the Telegraph

2011-09-27T10:20:00Z

A few weeks ago I was in a Telegraph supplement talking about cloud. Here’s the online version of the article on the Telegraph (UK national newspaper) website.

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2012-03-07T05:25:14Z

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2012-03-07T05:25:53Z

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2012-03-07T05:26:19Z

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How do you support consumerisation of IT

2012-03-07T05:25:24Z

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How do you support consumerisation of IT

2012-03-07T05:28:36Z

Delivering an environment where people are able to bring their own devices into the office and use them is certainly one of the biggest trends of our time and it’s proving to be one of the hardest things to support. To quote Forrest Gump “you never know what you’re going to get”. How do you provide support into an environment where you don’t know what it is that you’re going to be supporting? Do you need Windows skills, Mac skills, iOS skills, Android skills or all of them, the answer is probably all, but you need to concentrate on the managing and supporting the environment and the data rather than the devices.

Setting expectations

That of course is easy to say but difficult to do when you bring user expectations into the equation. Do your users expect you to be able to fix every problem that they have? Probably yes, over time that will change and my hunch is that it probably already is and you don’t know it but perhaps it’s going to require a push to get things started. That push will probably come in the form of a win/win approach of changing the depth what you are expected to support in exchange for supporting more breadth of support. Gartner back in July published a paper Best Practices for Supporting ‘Bring Your Own’ Mobile Devices which I thoroughly suggest reading but without thinking solely about mobile device support and just thinking about device support.

One of the key aspects of support that’s addressed really well by this paper is how you define support. Certainly in my 10 years of hands on experience in the industry I’ve come across two types of support the standard support type of “technically bounded” or break/fix (when it breaks you’re bound to fix it) and “best efforts” (you keep going until you can’t be bothered any more).

Lots of us don’t really take too much time thinking about this because as IT Professionals there is a huge amount of professional pride in fixing a problem – indeed I count problem solving skills as probably the most important skill set of anyone in IT. So we end up doing everything to find a fix and that’s what most of our user base has traditionally expected us to be able to do: Fix it. I’d argue that much of our identity as professionals is wrapped up in that too. My experience also leads me to see that most of us have implemented “best efforts” for technologies that have sneaked their way in.

How many people are running their mobile strategy on a “best efforts” approach? I think in smaller enterprises it’s likely to be more prevalent than in larger enterprises but I’m sure there are groups of special case users who get “best efforts” around their odd bits of kit – in house graphics teams using Macs are often in this camp too – again in my experience. I don’t particularly like this approach to support because it’s missing one of the most important aspect of support: reasonable expectation setting for the user. As a user I don’t know where I am.

What I really like is the idea of “Timeboxed” support. This is an idea that is really simple for everyone to understand and Wikipedia does a great job of defining Timeboxing but an example is a great idea to describe it. A football match is a time boxed activity, there’s a start time, everyone knows it’s going to last for 90 minutes and if it’s not won (resolved) at the end of that time there is a contingency for extra time. The beauty of this is that everyone is aware of the expectation in advance and they know what they’ll get out of it. For this reason I love this idea when you consider support of wildly disparate end points.

Of course you cannot use one method in isolation. It would be really hard to do time boxed support of your network, for example, because you own that infrastructure and therefore you are solely responsible as an organisation for it. For that reason it strikes me that time boxed support for Bring Your Own Devices is a great thing, with traditional technically bound support remaining for “owned” infrastructure.

What happens when the time runs out? What a great question and this is where leveraging this as a win/win scenario comes in along with management of your environment. Your technical people need to be able to deal with the most common eventualities of connecting devices into your environment which requires you to major your knowledge around the environment. You have of course allowed the user to select their kit, told them that you’ll spend a maximum of an hour fixing it and when that doesn’t work they will have to consider their position or use a corporate asset.

Which is where one of the more important tactics for a really good BYOC or consumerisation programme comes in – maintaining standard business connectivity devices. You still need a bit of kit that you will guarantee to work at all times that is still covered by your technically bound support option because your business, your users need to run no matter what.

Self help

Earlier I suggested I had a hunch that support was already changing and the reality is that access to information is making that happen. Some organisations are seeing users search for an answer for a technical problem first especially so in organisations with some form of BYOC policy and especially in the millennial work force. An example close to home is me. At Microsoft we have a pretty consumerised approach and I can say honestly that I’ve not called our helpdesk in over a year – granted and I’m far more technical than most, but I don’t have access to administer AD in Microsoft. That means I cannot just give myself access to a share or something. Generally if something is wrong firstly I Bing it. Then I check on our internal help and fora. Calling the helpdesk is the last resort and not because they are under skilled, far, far from it, it’s because it’s faster to search for it. Self-help works at my pace.

So in a consumer world self-help is critical, peer or community help is secondary and helpdesk is relegated to tertiary help – generally the place you go when you MUST get it fixed. Should we be insourcing those helpdesks again?

Help doesn’t just exist to fix things of course, help is also where you go for service and as such a self-help service system for moves, adds and changes is a must. Forefront Identity Manager and management of your AD are key to keeping things running smoothly. Again in Microsoft if I want access to something I request access using FIM and if the owner of the asset (usually data of some form) agrees I get it. EVERYTHING is managed through a single point of truth – Active Directory – including my access to cloud services using ADFS, total integration and a very low cost of doing business.

Things to think about

Supporting users in a consumerised environment is just like it always has been. The keys are:

· Set clear expectations

· Provide support options that work on their terms

· Prove access to as much support as you can

· Support what you control: data and environment, devices will come and go

· Maintain a baseline and use it as fall back

If you’d like some help getting to grips with new technologies then give Microsoft Virtual Academy a go

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Notes from The Cloud Circle

2012-03-07T05:25:34Z

Hi folks I’ve just jumped off stage and as promised here are a load of links about what I’ve just talked about, some of the companies I highlighted and other useful resources. After the links you’ll find a SkyDrive based copy of the…(read more)

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Notes from The Cloud Circle

2011-09-19T20:31:59Z

Esri running on Windows Azure
Air Products running HPC with Windows Azure and HPC Server 2008R2 dealing with unpredictable bursting
Exceedra and their supply chain management and prediction running on Windows Azure
Associated Press and their News Reader application, created on Windows Azure
Risk Metrics and the awfully complicated Monte Carlo simulation
Some that I didn’t have time to mention
The Royal Mail have 28,000 people using cloud based collaboration with Microsoft
UK based hoster, Fast Hosts, use Hyper-V cloud
You should also take a look at this whitepaper by my colleague Steve Plank about agility.

7th cloud circle forum keynote

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The week that was on the UK TechNet blog: 5 September – 9 September

2011-09-12T09:48:12Z

It’s been a manic time here in TechNet HQ with all the handover that’s been going on. Nonetheless, better late than never here is your round up of last week’s action. September’s TechNet magazine is out now Meet your UK TechNet team SQL Server sprawl…(read more)

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The week that was on the UK TechNet blog: 5 September – 9 September

2011-09-12T09:48:12Z

It’s been a manic time here in TechNet HQ with all the handover that’s been going on. Nonetheless, better late than never here is your round up of last week’s action.

September’s TechNet magazine is out now
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· Helping you tackle the 10 immutable laws of security

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Why monitor Windows Azure with System Center?

2011-09-08T13:54:00Z

One of the questions that I often get into when talking with folks normally have a dev head on around Windows Azure is why you’d want to be able to monitor a Windows Azure application with System Center and why you wouldn’t just build a bespoke monitoring solution since you’re building an application already. The answer is actually a very obvious one to integrate with existing systems. Anyone with an ounce of IT operational background or ITIL training will tell you that you rightly need to centralise monitoring and ultimately to simplify it. The first obvious reason why you’d do that is to save money but there’s a second reason:

That amazing application probably isn’t running in isolation.

You’ll find that it requires other components like network connectivity (yes even in the cloud) to be in place and available – particularly if you’re running in a hybrid environment. A holistic management solution, such as System Center will help you to achieve an overall view of what’s going on, of all the dependencies on various components of the system.

Interestingly we’ve just moved such a system to Windows Azure, along with the required monitoring and documented the whole process with a case study of moving a Business Critical application to Windows Azure. The article is well worth a read for anyone thinking about moving an application to the cloud but the following stuck out for me as benefits:

Accurate and timely monitoring and alerting for [application] critical components
A large number of reusable monitoring components that can be leveraged in future Windows Azure applications

Accuracy and timeliness are so important in IT Operations it’s untrue but that second benefit around reusability is also so important. Not only will you have developed a reusable system monitoring Windows Azure applications but you’ll also have reusable skills.

How do you get started? Well you could just download this little package of 2 ready made evaluation VHDs and play with a pre-built Windows Azure application, I have and it really doesn’t take long to get to grips with.

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Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2

2011-09-01T15:06:49Z

One of the questions I get asked constantly is about the safety of placing your data into particular environments, so I was quite pleased when I noticed that we’d released the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 which helps you to do one of the basic tasks you’ll have to undertake. Understanding your data. I make no bones about it I think this is one of the key skills for IT Professionals going forward and it’s one of the key ways that you can help your business by providing intelligence to them to help the business make decisions. The pack has the usual US take on it but that’s no bad thing in this case.

I shouldn’t have to say that using the tool doesn’t equate to proper advice from auditors, accountants or attorneys but I just have.

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The future of IT for MSPs

2011-08-25T15:50:00Z

Today I presentated to a group of about a thousand managed service providers about Microsoft’s cloud and what it means for the future of IT. I though I’d throw up this post to provide some extra resources like the deck embedded below that I used for the presentation. I’d like to thank my friends at GFI for the time and for inviting me to do one of their webinars, hopefully it’s something we’ll be repeating. If anyone would like to get in touch following the presentation or if you have questions or comments feel free to comment on this post, to tweet me, or email me – simon dot may at microsoft dot com.

The future of IT for MSPs

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A tour of Microsoft’s Datacentres

2011-08-18T08:00:00Z

A few weeks ago now we made the following video tour of our Datacentres available for all to see on the GFS website and also on YouTube. At the time I forgot to post it but having just happened across it I thought it worth sharing. I constantly get asked about the size and scale of our DCs and this really shows them off…and yes the Dublin DC is one of the worlds largest DCs at 330,000 square foot or about the size of 3 of the UKs largest Super Markets all under one roof. Why does that matter? Because building and learning about Data Centers at that scale is something few others can do.

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Free Office 365 eBook for everyone

2011-08-17T19:18:12Z

Something rather interesting just crossed my desk and I thought it was worth sharing. This free eBook just landed (virtually) on my desk and it really is an eBook at circa 300 pages of explanation about Office 365 how it works and who it’s useful for. It’s not a deeply technical book but it is a great introduction and if you’re trying to convince anyone that using Office 365 is for them then it’s a great book for them to be able to flick through. The book’s also really good at helping you to get to grips with using Office 365 to collaborate with 6 chapters dedicated to just that.

Download the free Office 365 eBook by Katherine Murray and let us know what you think.

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Building your consumerisation of IT strategy (part 2 of 2)

2012-03-07T05:29:26Z

Welcome to part two of this post the first part of Building your consumerisation of IT Strategy can be found here

Productivity

Consumerisation and productivity go hand in hand, but it might not be top of mind when you first think about consumerisation. Being productive in some way, however, is the main driver for consumerisation in the mind of the user. Sure, they might also be thinking about using a device that makes them look good, but most people are really motivated by doing something well (I’d like to think), and if having a shiny device in front of a customer when making a sale helps the sale, well…

When we think about productivity, though, we almost always think about software, and having good software that people know how to use and want to use is essential. People need to have software that lets them achieve the same results at work as at home, so the idea of productivity changes a little. First and foremost productivity software does need to do the things that it’s always done: write documents, understand data, create presentations, organise information, collaborate. Modern productivity software needs to go far beyond that remit, though, because people simply expect to be able to do more with what they have. They might not use everything all the time but they do expect to be able to do it when they need to.

Take the example of creating a presentation. When you’re in that particular flow of organising information into a digestible form, people find it useful to be able to embed and edit video, to crop, alter and colour pictures and to be able to insert eye-popping charts. It would be a far more interesting world if everyone used all the tools open to them but it’s better that they’re there than for users to have to go grab £60 of video editing software or £200 of photo editing software. Having really strong basic productivity tools that do more than just the very basics makes good business sense, so it should still be a cornerstone of your strategy.

Seamless collaboration is something that’s become essential, yet few people even realise that it’s part of consumerisation. People collaborate around slightly different things in a consumer setting; not so much around documents but more around pictures and video. Being able to quickly and simply share a photo on Facebook is so ubiquitous that people do it now without even thinking about it, and they also expect people to be able to comment on those items immediately. This simple act of sharing is the first step to collaboration. How much more useful is this in a business setting when what’s shared is a tender document and colleagues working on it together can simply comment or make updates?

Collaboration as a part of consumerisation makes the tools for collaborating more natural for the end user. That could be a SharePoint site where people can upload, comment on or edit the document online, or it could be using Lync to have a real-time conversation about a document. Better yet, it could be having an online meeting using Lync, where one colleague presents the slides and can go back a slide or two when someone gets lost. Your strategy for productivity within a consumerisation strategy should be to naturalise workflows.

In my mind, Office 2010 is the starting point. Again, most people have Office at home, many people use some kind of sharing site and many use video conferencing or internet voice calling, like Skype, on a regular basis. In a business environment you need similar functionality but with some central control.

Application development

This area should be a no-brainer for everyone. Does it cost more to produce one version of an application or two? Wherever you can it’s wise to build your strategy around minimising the number of bespoke applications you need, but you should also try to minimise the need to build applications for different devices. Sure, it might be popular to have an iPad version of your internal sales tool, but at what cost? The reality is that with the proliferation of all these different types of devices it might seem like you need to invest money in having a custom application developed. There are, however, lots of other options.

One such option is to develop a web app. Most devices are capable of viewing web pages, so it’s perfectly possibly to do, even if it’s not all that popular. There are times, though, when a web app becomes the right move. I suspect we’ll see much more being made of the “touch-friendly web” or some such naming over the coming years as we see all devices, including PCs, becoming better at touch. A touch-friendly website is a good move in many ways, not least because the tendency is for touch-friendly to equate to user-friendly. The National Rail website is a great example.

Websites should work the same on a touch device as with a keyboard and mouse, and so should applications. If you’re currently running a project to develop any application ask yourself and your development/UX (User Experience) team if the website works well with touch. If it’s an internal-facing application ask the question until you get the right answer – in my experience they tend to hang around for about five to seven years between major iterations.

This is more than a question about UX. It’s a question about the OS you are targeting. If you build an application for Windows, you know it will work on Windows regardless of it being a on touch-friendly device like the current crop of great devices from Asus, Acer, Fujitsu and Novatech (to name just four). Someone will probably comment to say that’s not the case with Windows Phone, but I’ll pre-empt that by saying again that there’s more to device targeting and it goes deeper into the realm of code reuse. Someone else will probably comment to say that there have been countless application compatibility issues with Windows over the years, and there have, but there have always been numerous ways to mitigate the problems. The miriad ways to mitigate IE6 compatibility issues is a testament to that.

So how should one think about application development within a consumerisation sense? For me it’s simple: do as little development as you need to help your users. By that I mean it would seem wasteful to build different applications for each target device. Always look for at least one parallel of synergy: same language, same framework, same delivery vehicle.

Your delivery vehicle is another interesting consideration. It’s worth remembering that self-service application deployment (aka an application market place) is a normal thing now – everyone is used to using them on mobile devices. I’ve already written about the importance of self service in consumerisation, though.

Summary

So when thinking about building a consumerisation strategy you’ll want to consider:

Devices: Think about what “support” means, about changing how you buy devices
Security and management: Think about data, provide access to it whilst considering the circumstances
Productivity: Think about making the workflow as natural for the end user as possible, pre-empt as many of their actions as possible
Application Development: Think about finding commonality between the devices you target so you need to do less development

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Building your consumerisation of IT strategy (part 1 of 2)

2012-03-07T05:29:14Z

The consumerisation of IT trend is hurtling towards most IT shops and it’s clear from those I talk to that they’re just trying to deal with things as they happen. The MD wants to attach his cool new device but what does that mean for IT – are they expected to support it? What’s the cost of doing that? What else needs to change? It’s clear to me we need a more strategic approach to consumerisation that allows for flexibility and helps reduce costs whilst still permitting the choice that end users now demand.

It’s something Microsoft has been thinking about and you’ll start to see us talking about consumerisation in terms of devices, security and management, productivity and application development. A clear understanding of an evolving trend is always going to be difficult to build, but it’s good to see that we’ve thought about a way to frame our thinking. Whilst it clearly needs deep thought, it’s a good place to start from.

Devices

At the forefront of the trend is probably the fact that new devices are coming into organisations at an uncontrollable rate. More tech-savvy consumers are bringing their kit into the office excited by the potential that those devices hold. People expect access to their email at any time and many even expect to converse with their friends or organise their social lives when they’re in the office. They will find whatever way they can to use their devices, and sometimes that will comply with IT policy, but often it won’t.

We’ll tackle the management of those devices in a few paragraphs. First, let’s just have a little look at the potential advantages that using those devices will bring to your business. Strategically you should consider allowing a couple of options over device choice for your users. The first is to allow them to Bring Your Own Computer, or BOYC. BYOC has a number of advantages for you as an organisation, not least of which is that you don’t need to own the asset or have it on your books and depreciate it over time. You could consider a couple of ways of doing this; one might be to give your employees a “technology allowance” that works in a similar way to a car allowance. Obviously there are tax implications for doing this for your employees, but it would move the cost to Opex from Capex.

That wider choice will also help make your employees feel more valuable and more trusted because you’ll be giving them the chance to make their own decisions. You can still centralise purchasing control and exercise some guidance around devices by bringing in a computer leasing company, just like with a car scheme. Just be aware that, unlike cars, computers are actually quite cheap and this could backfire on you if people choose not to lease from your list. It may just be better to allow your employees to buy whatever they like off the shelf.

The other option for device acquisition is to spruce up your list of approved devices. Select kit that appeals to your user base but that is still worthy of your support and the time required for your IT team to support it.

You should also think about the types of devices you’ll support. You also need to be really crisp and clear about what “support” means to your end users. This is where clear communication comes in and it leads to the idea of having a communications team or (better still) a marketer whose job it is to communicate IT services updates to your organisation. If you’re wondering why I’ve suggested a marketer it’s because marketers understand the environment into which they are selling (and your IT department is now selling itself). You may find that you need to redefine the term “support” within your organisation, changing user expectations dramatically.

Not sure what I mean by redefining support? Well, with consumerisation you need to focus on providing flexibility, and that will probably mean evolving your support functions into connection functions, ensuring that any device can be connected in a safe and secure way that meets business requirements. Realistically, you want to be looking at a way to support the people for whom you need to be most flexible (you know the ones – usually they have a C at the start of their job title!) in a way that seems similar to everyone else – it’s far easier to play to the highest common denominator in this case.

We’re starting to get into some familiar ground here around security and management, but before we do and whilst we’re on support, it’s important to note that you probably need to do some heavy lifting using self-service to reduce the load for simple fixes. General things like “how do I do this formula in Excel” are best handled by a Bing search or something similar internally. You can find out more in this post about why self service is so important to consumerisation and cloud.

Device selection is an obvious area for concern. It would be helpful if you could guide your employees to use the right kind of kit, because if they’re buying their own devices you need to make sure they will still be securable and manageable. Think, for example, about how you remote wipe a device. It’s really easy when you have a device with a 3G connection, but how do you remote wipe a device that only has WiFi if it gets stolen? Food for thought.

Security and management

When you think about management and security you probably first think of managing and securing Windows PCs. Given that you’re reading this on a Microsoft blog you might be thinking I’d be extolling the virtues of that. I am, but it’s about far more than that. Your management software and security strategy needs to be able to manage your users’ Windows devices, but it must also be able to manage and secure other devices. If your CEO wants to use his iPad you need to be able to secure it, and critically you need to be able to remote wipe it if it goes wrong and he’s syncing his corporate email. Tricky if it only does WiFi. So what do you do in that case? Well, firstly you only allow the devices that you trust to access some parts of your IT. For example, it’s fine to trust people to access their email on a mobile device, but to ensure security and to reduce operational risk you probably want to ensure your users have access to (and know how to use) rights managed email. With that technology you can ensure that sensitive emails are only accessible to the intended recipient and also that they can only access that specific, sensitive email on a secure device, or possibly just through a HTTPS secured web page.

You can probably see now that security and management in a consumerised IT shop needs to take a data-security led approach, but one that differs to most you might have come across before. Traditional data security has a (user perceived) focus on preventing access by working against a lowest common denominator model of ‘block access to people who shouldn’t have access’. It’s been a good approach for the greater part but has led to disenfranchisement of the user base in many organisations. Far better to promote a security model based on circumstance.

The HR Director has access to all personnel records, for example, except if she’s accessing the HR system from a PC that’s facing the window. If you don’t think this is possible then you should have a look at some of the solutions for Remote Desktop from Quest. Perhaps the HR Director also shouldn’t be able to have access to the HR system, which is web based, from a slate device or even from a PC that doesn’t have up-to-date anti-malware. Again, perfectly possible scenarios using solutions like the Forefront family. The big thing to do then is understand the data in your organisation and grant access based on circumstance and identity. Deep understanding of data is something you need for the cloud, too, so it’s a good project to kick off.

Flexibility in security and management solutions is also required, because in order to deal with security based on circumstance you need to be thinking about a devices lifecycle. When you think about lifecycle you start to realise that a device tends to go through stages – things like power on, load OS, pre-logon, sleep, hibernate, wake from sleep, power down, internet connected, no internet connected, LAN connected, WAN connected, VPN connected…the list goes on. Here you soon start to notice you need security solutions that start and stop as early as possible and remain constantly pervasive.

This is where solutions such as DirectAccess (a remote network solution enabled by Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 and enhanced by ForeFront) come in. DirectAccess starts early on in the lifecycle of a Windows 7 device and creates a tunnel back into your corporate network that effectively brings the devices onto your LAN and into your management sphere. This means it’s possible to quickly deliver patches, do remote control and manage every aspect of the device. Windows Intune provides a similar solution in a different way. Rather than forming a tunnel into the corporate network, the management agent simply talks to the cloud. That immediately means that patches, antivirus and policies can be deployed, and soon you’ll be able to deploy your own software over the Internet, too – a feature already in the beta.

Questioning the idea of “secure” also needs to be a prime concern when dealing with consumerisation. Do you trust your LAN? Unfortunately the answer should probably be no. You’ve probably had to deal with a virus outbreak already in your life, possibly more than one, and they typically happen because a device on your network doesn’t have enough security to prevent infection. That infection will spread and eventually take hold, leading to lost weekends and overtime. Technology like Network Access Protection (NAP) allows you examine devices connecting to your network and if they don’t match your standards they don’t receive an address, or are placed into a “remediation” network. A remediation network can provide access to services like Windows Update for patching but perhaps doesn’t allow access to your internal HR or email systems. In a consumerised IT shop, though, it could be a good idea to treat your remediation network as the Internet – give people access to everything if at all possible.

Summary

Devices: Think about what “support” means, about changing how you buy devices
Security and management: Think about data, provide access to it whilst considering the circumstances

In part 2 we’ll take a look at some of the thoughts you need to keep in mind around productivity and application development. For now though knowing that a modern desktop and management are key parts of the puzzle I’d suggest deepening your thoughts about getting off XP and onto Windows 7 and implementing management with System Center. The Springboard resources that we have available are a good place to start investigating Windows 7 deployment.

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Resources for IT Apprentices

2011-07-27T08:31:44Z

Today I went to talk to a group of IT Apprentices at QA’s centre in Birmingham, thanks for a good day guys and especially to Lorette who organised the day. If you aren’t sure what apprentices are then you should find out more about IT Apprenticeships, however this is probably mostly being read by the folks who were there so here’s my deck from the day and some links to some of the things we looked at. Remember all these resources are free.

Cloud to it as

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Free Trial of Office 365

Free trial of Windows Intune

Free trial of Windows Azure

And here too is my previous deck from another apprentices session

Cloud for IT Apprentices

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Key trend in the consumerisation of IT: self service

2012-03-07T05:29:41Z

Consumerisation is an amazing trend; the idea that anyone can make choices about the way they work and the tools they use to get their job done. From an IT point of view it can, at first, look like a scary proposition. All those people bringing in different bits of kit and making you look after them, manage them and connect them to your network. Of course, consumerisation is about far more than just devices – it’s actually about new ways of working, not about specific bits of technology. It’s about what the technology enables.

One of the more interesting aspects of the consumerisation trend is that people are more willing to do more for themselves – providing the tools are right. Not convinced? Just have a quick think about the types of things you used to do that required someone else’s input in the past:

Grocery shopping – once you visited a shop where the shop keeper served you, then came supermarkets, now online shopping is commonplace
Car insurance – once you visited a broker, then you called them, then you did it online, now you use a comparison site
Banking – once branch-based, now online banking is considered a norm and mobile banking is becoming a norm

Whilst these are all examples of consumerisation (consumerisation being about convenience at its root) they aren’t really examples of the consumerisation of the services we provide as IT professionals. Sure, they have a technology element, but they don’t directly relate to the enterprise. Does the model that we see evolving above have a place, though? I think it does; I think there is a key to enabling consumerisation in those three examples. Self-service is one of the keys to the consumerisation of IT.

Self-service is nothing new; we’ve had it for decades. We’ve been attempting to create self-service portals for one thing or another for years and I see this as a positive. Self-service is such a key lever that we have been pushing for it for so long purely because we know it’s the right thing to do. Applying it to IT systems, though, has often been done for the wrong reasons, in my opinion. Every self-service project I’ve ever been involved in that the users hated was done with the wrong primary driver. Cost saving is not the primary driver of good self-service.

Again, if we take the above three examples we can reach the same conclusion about why have they evolved as we know them today:

Grocery shopping – internet shopping – it’s convenient for the consumer
Car insurance – price comparison sites – it’s convenient for the consumer
Banking – online / mobile banking – it’s convenient for the consumer

Consumer convenience is the real driver. Cost reduction is a nice to have, but what does it mean to the consumerisation of IT? Here are my thoughts about where to bring a consumer-centric self-service model into play, why such models work and how they can help you save money.

Application market places

These days you don’t have to look far for an example of market places that have been a runaway success – application market places being an obvious one. That runaway success is an indicator that your users will be able to get their heads around the idea of a self-service market place to install their applications. Products like System Center can help you build an application catalogue that your end users can deploy for themselves. If you aren’t already doing enterprise application deployment (and most large enterprises are – I was employed to do this 11 years ago on SMS 1.2), then you must be under significant pressure for human-based installs. If you’re doing enterprise app deployment but there’s no self-service aspect, you have to ask yourself why you’ve not made that step.

If you think about what the end user wants when they ask for an application, they really just want to do a specific job. They need Visio to make a diagram, they don’t have Visio, they ask how to get Visio, they find the form, fill it out, wait, get told it’s not right, rework it, submit it, wait, then someone pushes out the package and then….well, by that time they don’t need Visio. It would be far more user-centric to have allowed them to self-select the product and install. Licensing just reared its head there and some will say that licensing gets in the way of this model – I agree it’s a challenge, but you need to work that out for your business – if someone needs Visio to do their job, they need it (or a similar tool to which you can guide them).

The advantage of an application market place is that it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate guidance to your users around the decisions they make.

Self-help

This, for me, is the biggest no-brainer self-service system to support consumerisation. Where do you go to get help with a technical problem? You go to your favourite search engine (Bing, obviously) and search for it. Where do your users go when they need help? Do they call you, or do they Bing it first? If they’re calling you it’s probably because you’ve got a restrictive IT regime in place and they think it’s the only route. If they call you when they can’t find the information they need, how can you help them better?

Enterprise search in the form of SharePoint FAST is a pretty darn powerful tool, and it can, with almost no configuration, search within the content of all the documents you pop on your SharePoint. Why not just upload your technical library of word documents created by your IT team and let your end users search them? Granted there could be some dark secrets in there, like administrator passwords and secrets (e.g. you can still launch a command prompt from a help file, but your end users can probably find the latter from the internet anyway). If something needs to remain secret then apply appropriate content control.

You’ll find that all the good public cloud based services have great self-help built in, Office 365 being no exception.

Remember what the point of a good self-help system is; it’s to allow people to consume conveniently. You don’t need to start out with heavy taxonomy. Begin with a simple search and allow people to tag and organise the content themselves to reduce management burden – just manage the content, not the content discovery. This will save you money running your helpdesk and make your end users more efficient. If you don’t believe me, do a simple trial.

Self-service infrastructure

This is the biggie with private cloud: it needs to be self-service/no-service to make it a private cloud. Private clouds are about providing resources to end users who can do things with them that give the business an advantage in some way. What everyone is looking for in a private cloud is the ability to have as much of the operating model of the public cloud as possible. Let’s give people what they want – if they need a new VDI session for a new starter, give them a simple portal through which to request the desktop and have it auto provision in the back end. If they need a new SharePoint team site, let them provision it themselves – they know what they need, so ask what value you’re adding and step out of the equation.

Don’t forget that sometimes no-service infrastructure is better than self-service. If it’s the end of the month and the pay run is on, allow the payroll system to auto scale up – a simple example of no-service, or rather no- human-interaction-required-service. Of course no-service can be helpful in other places: the VDI session we created above can be de-provisioned after 30 days automatically to prevent VM sprawl and to save cost.

When dealing with self-service infrastructure on behalf of a person (or department or team), don’t forget to make it chargeable. Making things chargeable helps keeps a keen eye on preventing sprawl, and doing so up front, when the user is making a decision, triggers extra decision making to ensure they do the right thing.

Self-service BI

The information you have within your business is a key asset (I actually rank it only next to people in that respect), so being able to make the most of that information is one of the most important things any business has in its arsenal. It’s no secret that data is getting bigger either, over time there’s more of it, so being able to store it is expensive. As a result, from a purely financial point of view, being able to make best use of it is critical.

Allow your people to be agile with the way they use data; let them break it down in interesting ways by giving them the tools for self-service BI. It’s actually quite simple to do, be it giving them Excel 2010 (which can process about 1m rows of data!), democratising data using SQL Server 2008R2, giving them cool tools like PowerPivot or even giving them a simple coding environment like LightSwitch. People will be able to do better things with data than even you can think of.

Of course you need to remain responsible, giving users appropriate access and protecting that incredible corporate asset.

Summary

Hopefully you can see that providing people with the tools to do things themselves need not be scary. Rather it’s a natural evolution of the way we’ve done things for years. It’s also something that your end users will not only be able to accept, but will actively want to adopt. The role of the IT professional is pretty clear – be a guide not a gatekeeper, provide appropriate access to the tools of work.

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The changing IT landscape and the evolving role of IT in the Enterprise

2011-07-06T19:57:17Z

I’ve just done a talk at the Cloud Circle Forum about the future of IT and how two of the current big trends, consumerisation and cloud computing are going to change the IT department. Here are some resources that I think you’ll find useful if you were there on the day or if you’re just interested in the topics. (hint: if you work in IT you should be). Below you’ll find the deck, blogs and whitepapers.

Some Interesting links

Below you’ll find some interesting links on the topics of consumerisation and the cloud from my personal blog and some other interesting sources.

A really interesting article on how cloud will change IT in 2011 and beyond. What I think makes this interesting is the differentiation and acceptance that the world of small business will be very different from that of large organisations.
How the consumerisation of IT affects IT departments describes some of the ways that your IT department will be affected by allowing user to take advantage of any device they wish
3 new heroes in next generation IT Departments and The 6 hottest new jobs in IT by Ravi Nar both posts talk about some of the new roles that we’ll see in the future and are starting to see now
5 Imperatives for modern IT departments I believe all IT departments must do this now to control their destiny
How the public cloud affects your IT Department how the use of public clouds affects your IT department but more importantly how they can take advantage of it
Resources from my Modern Desktop Presentation is a collection of resources from TechDays that will help you to picture what a desktop should look like today (hint: it’s not running an OS from the age of VHS!)
IT Professionals and the cloud infographic a great graphic that we created after we talked to almost 2000 IT professionals about cloud
How will my career evolve with the cloud how individuals can use their understanding of the cloud to take careers to the next level
Connecting the Private and Public cloud on of the big skills for cloud people, connecting the world.

The Deck

Here’s my deck from the day, it’s also available on the Cloud Circle Forum website as a PDF

Whitepapers

http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/paper/view/2104/business-agility-and-the-cloud.pdf Business agility is one of the most important aspects of the cloud and you can find an excellent white paper by Steve Plank just here

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Office 365 Detailed Service Descriptions

2011-07-04T09:17:05Z

If you’re considering Office 365 or have started with the free trial then you’d be well placed to head over and check out the Office 365 Service Descriptions where you’ll find some really deep information about what’s included in each part of the service. I’ve seen some mention of Office 365 not providing two factor authentication (some competitors doo)…well actually Office 365 does too as it says in the Identity Service Description:

Two-Factor Authentication for Office 365

Two-factor authentication (also called strong authentication) provides improved security by requiring users to meet two authentication criteria such as a user name/password combination and a token or certificate.

Planning for Two-Factor Authentication with SSO

To use two-factor authentication, you must implement an single sign-on strategy using Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 with Office 365. When planning your implementation, consider whether users have a supported operating system, are inside or outside the corporate network, and are using rich clients or web browsers. Also consider the ability of your authentication provider to interoperate with other services.

These guides are essential for anyone working their way through deployment of Office 365 in a large environment and probably for anyone considering the move

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How the consumerisation of IT affects IT departments

2011-07-02T02:13:28Z

There are a few trends that are affecting IT in some hard hitting, demanding and, for many, (work) life changing ways. Cloud is the first obvious one, but causing more of a pain in the IT department’s rear right now is probably consumerisation.

Consumerisation is a simple theory; that people want to be able to do things in the office with the same “ease” that they do at home. A couple of examples will help clarify: Jane wants to be able to search her email inbox and find the stuff she needs rather than having to file things. James wants to be able to use his iPad to get his work email – it makes it easier for him to process stuff whilst watching the telly at night. These both present problems for the traditional IT department. The email system might be out of date and iPad isn’t secure enough for your organisation’s policy.

What a conundrum. What we’ve been asking the IT department to do for years is to “manage all this complicated stuff for us”. Of course, over time, some of it’s become less complicated and we’ve all learnt a thing or two about working with technology, turning us all into techies. There was a time when being a techy meant being able to interact with a computer – now that’s just second nature.

This particular trend is hard for IT folks to assimilate because for years they’ve been placed in the position of being the people who would provide technology and, now it’s in abundance, it’s sometimes easier to circumvent the system just to get the job done. With that circumvention, however, comes a barrage of problems which eventually land on the poor IT manager to fix, and, obviously because it’s a problem, it’s the most urgent thing in the world. What a pain.

Seen through different eyes, though – those of the end user – things have become brilliant. No longer do you need to go begging to your IT manager for budget for a new PC – you just use your own, and as a result you no longer have to ask permission to do something, which saves you time and lets you get on with making money. It’s also pretty cool to be down the pub with your mates and pull your phone out of your pocket, then check that you haven’t had any mail since you snuck out 30 minutes early to have a beer. How cool!

So we have a situation where what’s cool for the users is a pain for the IT department, which is not so good…but the IT department is there to endure pain, isn’t it? Not in my book. There’s a better way. We’re starting to see that companies embracing consumerisation are enjoying some great benefits.

Benefit A – Happy people

Using equipment that you care about makes you care about your equipment more. Find any craftsman who cares about his work and you’ll find a rack of well-oiled, well-loved tools. In return their kit breaks less and they get more done. Allowing your end users more choice over the type of computer they use can lead them to care more for it, so that upfront investment you make in a shiny PC might result in fewer keyboard replacements, for example. Of course the ultimate end is that they may wish to purchase their own PC, and depending upon your size and type of business, that could be cheaper for you. Heck, they might even hunt more for a bargain and end up spending less.

The IT manager needs to act with one of my five imperatives, Be a guide not a gate keeper and help users make an informed decision. That might mean creating an internal site where they can “shop” for their next PC. It won’t take long before your users start to think of their kit as their own and even as an extension of themselves – a virtuous circle that might just make them happier.

They will be happier because they have choice and flexibility and fewer hoops to jump through. You’ll probably be happier as the IT manager – you get to be the good guys (as CBR says)

Benefit B – Lower costs (potentially)

That care and respect and the subsequent translation into a happy work environment will translate into lower costs as users not only care more for their kit and even hunt for better priced kit, but they stop calling IT to fix every little thing. With trust – in this case the trust to self-select – comes responsibility, and people don’t like to appear unable to handle responsibility. This doesn’t mean that they won’t need help but it may well mean that IT will get fewer calls asking “how do I…” Instead, they’ll probably turn to the Internet for help.

Embrace, Address, Block?

I think it’s going to be hard for organisations not to address consumerisation, but deciding if an organisation should embrace, address or block consumerisation is a tough call. I figure it’s going to (and in many cases already does) depend on the size of the organisation. It’s easy to see how smaller organisations will benefit from consumerisation when you consider such things as users possibly buying their own kit and paying for their own mobile data tariffs, for example, so I think we’ll see them embrace the trend very quickly.

Larger organisations will probably move to the position of addressing the trend by developing their own principles and practices to support consumerisation, but at the same time by ensuring that the organisation is safe and control remains central. User (customer) demand within their organisation is what will drive adoption of the trend, and therein lies the kernel of this trend – consumerisation is just demand-driven computing.

Many people argue that in a large organisation we might well see the provision of a “technology allowance” similar to a car allowance, giving users the opportunity to source their own kit. That’s a nice idea but anyone with a company car will know the taxation mire that this approach causes, and I think it’ll be years before the tax man catches up with the trend.

What we see day-in-day out is that it’s very hard for an organisation to throw away its old ways; there are just too many business reasons to not to do so. So how do you stick on the side of your users, not blocking them but retaining some control? You need to move to an operational model that allows you to address consumerisation, embrace it, extend access to consumerised devices and services, yet protect business interests – add value.

Addressing consumerisation

Here’s a little recipe of ideas that might help IT pros up against the wall with consumerisation:

You have a web-based HR portal and you’re concerned about the security of other browsers: Use a system like ForeFront Unfied Access Gateway to read the browser header and allow access only on devices with trusted browsers, directing other users to instructions for accessing the system.

You have a need to provide access to your productivity applications on a multitude of devices but don’t want the data to end up on those devices: Deploy RDS and provide remote desktop sessions or virtual desktops to those users, there are solutions from the likes of Citrix to help with that.

You’ve got a hot desk environment where users can use their own laptops but there are ground level windows and you don’t want passers-by snooping on people sat with monitors facing the window: There’s a solution from Quest that can help address that by being location-aware and allowing access to RD sessions from only specific locations.

There are loads of options depending on what you need to do, and large organisations will love the added flexibility that the consumerised approach gives them. What’s clear from commentary in places like CIO.com is that consumerisation needs to be managed (at least in large orgs).

If this has got you more interested in the consumerisation debate, there’s an event coming up later in July that should be in your diary. Hosted by Play.com, the event’s theme is ’How is service-oriented architecture changing to deal with an increasingly complex, multi-channel world?‘ Our very own Simon Ince is one of the speakers. You’ll get the chance to network and find out how other large organisations are addressing this challenge, happily fuelled by drinks and pizza. Here’s the agenda:

Play.com’s Cambridge Office, 14 July 2011

6.00 – 6:45pm Hello and drinks
6:45 – 7:30pm Presentations
7:30 – 8:30pm Drinks and pizza

For more information, contact the event’s organisers: christine.dineen@harveynash.com/ +44 20 7333 1825.

[foot note: I use consumerisation without a Z because I use British English]

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Welcome to the “post PC era” no wait it’s not

2011-06-21T17:37:46Z

Last week I was doing what I normally do – watching twitter – and noticed the seeds of an interesting conversation starting off from the #live11 conference around the end of the PC era. I think that’s just plain wrong and misses some important points and has the potential to derail the space time continuum in some way, so I jumped in. The debate raged in 140 chars (actually more like 100 minus the #tags and @names etc.) so we decided to take it further. The main protagonist in this story is Michael Greenland who it turns out is a stunningly good designer. He also uses both PC and Mac for his day to day role, lets divorce ourselves from that and the person though because it’s not the point, the point it to introduce a good egg.

So why don’t I agree with the post PC era, well you might say it’s because I work for Microsoft. I do, I love it here.

The premise is that the PC is based on this ancient definition from Wikipedia:

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator. In contrast, the batch processing or time-sharing models allowed large expensive mainframe systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time. Large data processing systems require a full-time staff to operate efficiently.

There are a number of things wrong here, the first of which is that we’re dealing with technology and (gulp) things change, but there are many things here that are right. Lets deal with what’s wrong. It’s the 3rd sentence.

Large data processing systems require a full-time staff to operate efficiently.

We’ve obviously fixed this with cloud – industry high-five! Sentence two needs to be updated to reflect cloud too but sentence one is spot on. Mr Jobs is usually attributed with saying we’re in the post-pc era (June 2 2010 according to TechRepublic) however there have been naysayers for years 2004 is the earliest I can find reference to. Any way we aren’t so lets move on.

Is your favourite slate general purpose? Yes ok How about your phone? Either of those devices a good size for you? – yep ok lets keep going. Do they have capabilities and a price that make it useful to an individual? Sure thing, that’s why they sell by the millions. Congratulations your phone is a PC. This is a trend called consumerisation and it’s seeing a resurgence in the market unlike tech has ever seen. Some think it’s new, I think it just holds new opportunities.

A lot of people are wedded to the idea that the PC is a grey box ‘o bits on your desk with a keyboard and a mouse. It’s not. It’s a human enablement device something that lets you do something in a general purpose way, an affordable price and in the right size (read that as form factor). That form factor is going to change because technology changes as will the price, as will what people want to do with it. So the premise for my believing that we are not in the post PC era is that what we are in the post grey box era and people saw an object and believed it to be a definition.

Just as people saw tin cans as defining a can. But today they aren’t often made from tin, they’re made from cool new stuff like aluminium and are easier to use with ring pulls, prettier with labels printed directly to the can and I’m sure some kind of special extrusion ingenuity that makes them cool to people who love cans. Most of us take cans for granted, as we do with PCs and that’s a good thing.

We’re on the precipice of the most dramatic change in PCs since they were invented, they’ve already started to get touchy with some amazing innovation and competition in the market has played no small part in that but the other motivator has been people. Far more important. People want to do different things today, they want to be able to have the same or better facilities at work as they do at home. PCs that are as attractive, as usable, as cool. They want PCs like those in The Collection (actually I don’t think they’re all cool but that’s just my definition of cool) however if Samsung would like me to sport the Series 9 I’d love to, thanks.

So divorce yourself from the idea that PCs are grey boxes.

I’d like you to take this definition from thefreedictionary.com which is again funny but it does provide an alternative. An alternative reality where we only have single function devices, imagine carrying a phone, an address book, a calendar, a notice board, a wall everything your device de-jour does today seems like an odd thing to do when you have a little PC in your pocket that you commonly call a smart phone. Single function devices have a place – I love my eReader – but a single function world is a giant step back. Oh yeah that definition goes on to mention Java and talks about code portability ask anyone – it’s not that simple.

Lets take a moment to celebrate being general purpose…imagine if everything only did one thing it would be hard to release potential, hard to innovate hard to do cool stuff. Life would suck. Life would be mundane. Life would be dictated. No thanks!

So where is this all going. We’re going natural user interfaces baby. They sound cool but we’re only breaking the surface, touch whilst it’s the next thing today is probably not going to be all that cool when you can WILL your things to do something. And you know what, the PC will be there doing that for you this multifunction, affordable, capable device in the right form factor for the job will be with you. Personal Computers – THE most personal computers even – won’t need keyboards or mice or touch or gesture control or whatever we invent next.

This isn’t just about the device though because the original premise was that cloud enables post PC and it doesn’t. Some of the heavy lifting can be done by the cloud but some can’t, there are times when you’ll want to be selfish. Times when you need to guarantee gargantuan gaming performance times when you want to max out your own processors to crunch some numbers and that’s going to stay with us for a while too. Until we reach a world of ubiquity of quality and speed of interconnection between devices – note though that today’s quality and speed is not tomorrows. We might be chasing our tail here.

Wow tech is cool – we’re going to do amazing things that we don’t know yet. The limiting form factor is you and I.

So how do you start the trend off, embrace it, use it to make or save money for you. Allow consumerisation into your organisation, know what you’re doing and control risk but don’t gate keep access that will just annoy people and 100 people tend to be smarter than 1. Guide don’t gate keep. Your people will be able to do more….with a PC.

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3 new heroes in next generation IT Departments

2012-03-07T05:30:00Z

I’ve already highlighted how IT departments are going to change over the next few years a few times and what some people in those departments are going to be doing as their roles inevitably change but there are going to be some new roles that appear too. These roles will start to shape how the IT department works for the next few years and, just like all IT jobs are, they’re a response to the changes going on in the business and in the market. As the industry chases the promised befits of cloud like reduced cost and increased agility these roles are going to be the new linchpins (as Seth would say) able to cross boundaries and pull leavers.

They won’t be the only people in the team, they will be new people or people who’ve stepped over from another discipline.

Cloud integration engineer

Linking everything together is going to be critical in the future. I wouldn’t say we’re at cloud version 1.0 yet – we’re probably closer to 0.7 where people are working out how to do cool things, there’s lots of experimentation going on. As we as an industry marches forward we’re turning over more rocks and identifying new bugs that need squashing. Who is doing the squashing though depends upon the type of bug but it’s clear that, as with anything new, we’ve got technology blazing a trail and lawmakers and regulators playing catch up. Add to that mix the fear of vendor lock in that some people have, the fear of giving up “control” and the worries that accompany anything new and you’ve got a mix complex mix of problems to overcome.

That’s where hero number one, the Cloud Integration Engineer comes to the rescue with his super power – connectivity. Cloud integration engineers will be adept at connecting public clouds and private clouds to create the now much touted hybrid cloud, part in your sphere of granular control, part in the sphere of vendor management. These guys will know the technology involved in Windows Azure to a deep enough level to understand how to connect an Azure and an on premises application together (hint they’ll be using Windows Azure Connect). These guys will also know how to throw up an EC2 instance and have it pull data from a SQL Azure database and they’ll know how to connect Exchange 2010 to Office 365 in a coexistence scenario so that the 2000 guys in a field in Devon get fast internal email over their 256k internet connection whilst the field guys get rapid connections where ever they are around the world.

Some will be experts in plumbing finished services (SaaS) together using APIs and code to do magic, others will be PowerShell gurus that can provision 100 mailboxes with a single command, others still will make ninja like use of the tooling. These guys will likely be capable of code but will understand the plumbing of enterprises well enough to make things seamless. They’ll have a better understanding of security than most developers and IT pros but they’ll be connected to the business so they’ll work as guides to security not gate keepers to access.

Cloud operations manager

Operations in the cloud is far simpler than it is with traditional infrastructures, primarily because you don’t need to manage everything at the most granular level. Managing IT Operations in the Data Centre is about managing servers, making sure they’re up, making sure the hardware is working, making sure they have enough memory and CPU for their highest load ( + 15% or so) , for some this will be the old days, but for most it’s today – even if they’re virtualised. Virtual doesn’t make resource management go away – it just changes the economics.

With the cloud you still need to manage resource and ensure availability to some extent – but it is an easier job. You don’t need to make sure that servers have enough memory any more, you need to make a choice about scaling up or out on demand. Scaling up is adding more servers, scaling out is about adding more powerful servers. It takes intelligence to make that call, it takes understanding of the business value of scaling, both the process of scaling and the decision can be automated though. To crystallise that lets take the ever-so-much over used tap metaphor of cloud.

In the tap metaphor we equate supply to a tap, when you turn it on the tap runs and you get the resource you want – cool. However you pay for what you use, so what happens if you’re not doing anything useful with your water, if it’s just running down the drain? If you equate the tap to a cloud service and the water to compute resource you get the picture – especially when you consider that taps get broken, develop leaks or occasionally a rogue plumber installs them. You need to ensure that the capacity you use is being used for business – that’s where the Cloud Operations Manager comes to the rescue with their power of insight.

These guys will be able to use their close business relationship to determine when it’s right to allow the tap to run free, and when it’s time to turn it down. When you’re being DDOS attacked and when you’re seeing a sales boom, when you’re internal users are hammering your SharePoint because the company just announced pay rises or because Bob from accounts accidentally posted his personal photos to the whole company he looks funny.

Cloud Operations Managers will also be watching what’s happening to ensure it’s sensible and complies with policy (which is obviously boring and stifles innovation / agility) but who else is going to make sure that when Bob in accounts leaves he doesn’t take his Docs account with him and oh the company looses all that information – that knowledge, the business intelligence, the competitive edge – just because the employ left taking their personal documents with them in cloud storage. They have the super-power of understanding.

IT Marketing and Communications Officer

Communication is why businesses succeed and fail, you can have a great plan, sound strategy, superb revenue streams but if your team can’t communicate they can’t succeed. When IT is one of the resources in the mix that allows your organisation to get things done communication about it’s benefits is essential. If you’re going to guide your organisation to make the most informed choices and to make the most of what they’ve paid for you need someone to be evangelising the options.

We’ve tried this as an industry before, numerous times over but a skill set that allows your IT department to market it’s wares it’s what’s needed. You need your people to know that they will benefit from using cloud storage because it’s pervasive and lets them access their information anywhere. Previously we as IT guys would probably have said that in terms of “to reduce the load on the file server so that we can save 2gb of storage” – terms that don’t matter to the end user. Marketers are adept at making things relevant to the their market, internally this means translating, explaining and engaging a user community. I’ve seen this done a few times, often under different banners with differing levels of success – however it’s worked best when a marketeer got involved. Essentially these folks will breed cooperation.

Summary

So there we have it, three new roles, superpowers of connectivity, understanding and cooperation, which when you think of it don’t sound that super do they? By the way all of these roles are available on job sites today. Whilst researching I found a role paying £120k per anum doing Windows Azure integration with existing systems, Operations Manager roles that commonly reference SaaS/IaaS/PaaS and private cloud and for the IT Marketing roles are hidden away in specialist recruitment circles – which is always a good sign.

If you think that these new roles will add cost to IT then, sorry, you’re wrong and for two reasons. The first being that they will possibly not be part of IT itself, IT will virtualise these roles into other areas of the organisation to provide deep integration with the day to day reality of what the organisation does. Secondly they’ll be saving money or making it, IT Marketing Officer will be extracting every last penny from the move to cloud based email like Exchange Online, the Cloud Operations Manager will be ensuring things stay on track and costs don’t scale out of control and the Cloud Integration Engineer will be helping make money by doing new innovative stuff – day in, day out – creating competitive advantage.

As an IT Pro how do you get there? Learn. Learn about virtualisation, learn about cloud. We have webcasts, jumpstarts, downloads, resources and you probably have free training hours if you have Software Assurance or an Enterprise Agreement. Us it.

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5 Imperatives for modern IT departments

2012-03-07T05:30:24Z

Last week I posted about how the cloud is going to affect IT departments in the future, thinking about how some roles are affected and the like, but this time I’m setting out a mini-manifesto for IT departments. This mini-manifesto isn’t for the IT departments that want to continue doing what they’re doing, it’s for those IT, IS, MI, ICT, (whatever TLA) departments that want to survive and add real value to their business. To be harsh it’s the for ones that want to get on the train of change not be run down by it.

Lets add some context. There are mega trends at work that are changing what IT is asked to do and by whom. Cloud computing is changing the tasks business IT people need to perform, a move from box patching to capability improvement, from break-fix to make-better; Consumerisation is changing who drives decision making, that sexy looking new PC vs. big grey box – the decision came from the user (who works in marketing and likes shiny shiny). To evolve I’ve created the following 5 imperatives that I think could drive modernised IT:

Be a guide not a gate keeper
It’s a big scary world out there and whilst user interfaces and workflows have been improved there are still things in technology that go bump in the night. It’s now easy for anyone to go and buy some servers on their personal credit card, buy a web site, bolt in some database stuff and create themselves a business critical ecommerce system – no IT involved. It’s now easy to decide that you don’t like the clunky corporate email system that hasn’t seen investment since 1999, set a rule to forward everything to your favourite web based email of choice (or worse chain them together to circumnavigate policy) and use that wonderful web mail; use it on your PC; your phone; your laptop; your mums-friends-aunts-sons PC. Love sales? Don’t like your cumbersome CRM system? Easy give all your data to someone who appears trustworthy and get selling!

They all sound pretty poor to seasoned IT Professionals and I’ve probably just given all the security people a fit but it’s happening every day. The reason is that it’s become easier to work around IT than with them. That has to stop.

Being the guide is about knowing what the best options for your business are and directing the business accordingly. Lets take email as an example. Everyone uses email (give or take) but the top pain points are all addressed by cloud based email services: storage, availability and ease of use. No one likes having to clear down their email, no one likes it when they can’t access their email (also people don’t like it when they can’t get their email on their device of choice now), no one likes not being able to find things through search. Web based email takes care of all this but not all are created equal. Add in some of the other stuff that people like to have – one single corporate address book that updates automatically, single sign on (so they don’t forget passwords that someone has to keep resetting at £5 per helpdesk call)…you get the picture.

The role here is to guide the business to make a better choice, guide them to fully featured enterprise capable cloud email and not to a consumer focused solution that will eventually cause them and you pain through outage or even worse data leakage.

Make information available in appropriate ways
One of the facts of life today is that people need information to do their jobs (yes everyone – as I write this I’m watching a team of builders throw up a block of flats, they keep waking me at 7am on weekends – any way they have an iPad that has their job details on, including the plans they’re building to, I just hope they have the scale right). As a result I believe we have a personal connection with data, we see it as our right.

Unfortunately not everyone spends their time thinking about the consequences of access to data but it’s something that IT professionals know is part of our job – it’s so ingrained it’s a cultural norm for us. Typically though we’ve controlled information by saying – No Bob you don’t need to see the CEOs Payroll details and we did this by preventing Bob’s access, physically stopping him from being able to access the information. With consumerisation and cloud though our data gets more mobility. Let’s say that Bob is actually the HR director and therefore he’s in a position to know our CEOs salary so he has the right to access the information; does his “right” to access the information extend to when he’s on a train, surrounded by people reading over his shoulder? Does that “right” extend to being able to download the information to a device without encryption and leave it on a park bench?

The logical answer is probably not but the people who make that choice are the business and they need to understand the risks and rewards of new ways of working. There are solutions that the new IT department will be required to put in place that will help secure information availability, not just access – luckily the toolbox is full of familiar kit. Need to secure emails so that sensitive info isn’t available on devices with weak encryption (but so that email still flows how your users want) – Rights Management in Exchange 2010 is your friend. Need to provide a secure desktop environement to use the HR system on a variety of devices – RDS, Citrix and Quest have solutions. Need to prevent Bob accessing the CEOs payroll data from his PC that faces an external window at street level (seriously what’s up with Bob!!) – Quest have a solution.

This imperative is about knowing what the right mechanism is to put in place to enable access to information, how the user wants it, with the security that’s just what the business requires. Not too little not too much it’s enabling access not preventing it

Promote inclusion, Prevent exclusion
~~Can your users bring their own device to work?~~ Are your users brining their own devices to work? If you said no then you probably work in a very secure part of the government where mobile phones are removed from people’s pockets when they walk in and placed into individual faraday cages. There’s an inevitability here – the horse has already bolted, sorry, move on. It’s not about stopping people using their devices – that will just p**s them off – use the above imperatives. Guide them to make a good decision about the devices they should buy for personal use, then ensure that they can access most of the information they need for their day to day work life on that device but be sure that the sensitive stuff is protected. Research shows they’ll be more productive (I won’t quote it – they’d charge me) but they’ll probably pay for their own mobile phone handset too because it’s such a personal thing – a part of them.

It’s not just about phones, it’s about any device. It could run Windows, Android, OSX, iOS, Chrome – in the future you won’t care, all you’ll care about is making sure that the person can do their work. That will mean securing their device, securing your network (which means moving to a model of not trusting your own network), securing your information and ensuring it all ticks along.

It is also not just about devices. Your users will be buying corporate resources on their credit cards because it’s easier to source a cloud service than it is through IT. So make sure you know the cloud. Make sure your curate the available cloud resources for your people, make it easier to take your recommendation by making your recommendation worth something. They want to setup forwarding of emails to xyz cloud email solution – just make sure they can’t forward the sensitive ones (see above “Control information availability”). They want to build their own e-commerce system, help them out by recommending one that secures passwords in an encrypted format not plain text – whatever your security standards are.

What’s the alternative. You buy the hardware, you mandate the decisions, you become viewed as the hard route.

Care about the business and the people in it
You need to know what the business is doing – it’s not sexy, there are now spinning disks, no flashing lights, no cables – but you need to be as involved in where the business is going as Finance, HR and Marketing are. This one is obvious so we won’t spend much time here, but if you know your business as well as they know themselves and know technology better than they do then you’re onto a winner.

Let your IT people have play time (measure it)
This should be very popular for the operational IT Professionals among you and slightly less popular within the operational IT managers. You need time to invest in the new things you want to be able to allow you business to do, your IT team will need to be focused on exactly what your users are – new shiny things that help us make money or feel good. As an IT Professional I believe you should be spending at least 10% of your time exploring technology, we work in the single most exciting field in the world – go play. If you think your job is about making Windows XP work really well for Bob then you’re in the wrong place or at least you will be soon – eventually your business will move on and without your skills being current you’ll be…lets not think about it. If you don’t know Windows 7 as a well as you know Windows XP by now then you should be panicking, downloading evaluations of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008R2, Hyper-V, System Center, Office 365, Windows Intune and anything else you can lay your hands on to get yourself up to speed.

If you’re an IT manager and you’ve not got a team that wants to upskill constantly then how are you ever going to move to a model of guidance, inclusion and information availability that makes your business love you?

Summary

The world is changing rapidly and IT needs to change to stay ahead so start with a step change in your organisation, kick off “project new dawn” (sounds very Tom Clancy) and centre on these key themes:

Be a guide not a gate keeper
Make information available in appropriate ways
Promote inclusion, Prevent exclusion
Care about the business and the people in it
Let your IT people have play time (measure it)

Simon is an IT Pro Evangelist specialising in Client and Cloud technology and doing lots of thinking about the future of the IT Profession. His TechNet blog contains his thoughts on much the same.

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How the public cloud affects your IT Department

2011-06-01T09:00:00Z

No one can fail to see how much impact the ideas of cloud are having on our organisations and as IT Professionals the most direct impact we feel is on us, on those we work with, on our IT Department. It doesn’t matter whether your “IT”, “IS”, “ICT”, “Information Management”, “IM” or whatever 2 or 3 letter abbreviations you have the cloud is starting to have an impact. Is it bad? Is it good? Two questions that only only time will reveal the answers to but there are changes afoot. It doesn’t matter whether your company has started to embrace cloud yet – eventually it will – in this article I’m focusing on how it’s going to change some of those specific roles in your IT Department.

Before we do that though lets just add some cloud clarity so that we know where we are. The cloud is any technology that enables on-demand rapid provision and release of resources that are highly available and shared between a group of users. For the purpose of this article we’re talking about resources shared between people who do not necessarily belong to the same organisation a.k.a the public cloud. Public cloud is arguably one of the top two technology trends affecting your IT Department today with the second being consumerisation – all those “unmanaged” devices that are popping up and you’re now being required to support.

You are now probably seeing demand for some of the following types of services:

Web based email
Web based file sharing
Web based CRM
Web based line of business software
Web based support software
Cloud based hosting

And in addition you’ve probably started to notice that you’re being excluded from conversations. A macro level trend is going on around you, your users have started to be tech savvy enough to make IT decisions without you (or at least they think they have – you’ll obviously have to come to the rescue!) One of the interesting key words just before that bullet is demand the trend of consumerisation has had an impact here and your users are now demanding that you provide them with IT Services on their terms.

If this hasn’t happened to you yet it, will, it probably but someone forgot to tell IT. This trend is most apparent when information starts leaking from your organisation through people emailing stuff home to work on because they have better tools.

Think of a train hurtling down the tracks, if you��re in front of that train the futures not so bright…if you’re on it then it’s a better place. That analogy is very close to home for some IT departments – I say it’s time to get on the train rather than trying to stop the thing with your bare hands. So what does it mean for the life of some of our favourite IT Department people:

The helpdesker (a.k.a. Frontline support analyst)

As the first point of contact in the IT Department the helpdesk staff have always been a linchpin of the team, taking calls, taking flack. It’s part of the job. Most people start out here and learn one of the key skills that’s always seen them through the career they made: customer service. And you know what, this is a growth area with public cloud. Very few public cloud operators will provide end user support, they normally provide level 2 support (which tends to materialise in IT depts as level 3) meaning that they won’t answer user queries such as “how do I do x”, “I’ve deleted this email, how do I get it back”. These folks provide a 2nd key skill too – business knowledge – even if you’ve outsourced your helpdesk you’ll find that the best operators know your business better than the worst. I personally am starting to see a trend of “insourcing” where the helpdesk is being brought home.

The desktop technician (a.k.a. 2nd level support, a.k.a “Dave in IT”)

Desktop technicians are still seen as the face of IT by most end users, even if they don’t see them that often. Most avoid giving out their direct line for fear of being stalked by Sally in accounts who just cannot use Excel – I know I’ve been there for many (joyous) years. Again these folks know the people they help, they provide deep business knowledge and have early warning radar and they combine a level of technical skill that makes most users think of them as heroes but interestingly they don’t get many calls from the younger people in the organisation but they do spend time with them exchanging stories around the coffee/tea/water/cigarette machine/shed. And they’re friends with them on Facebook.

The desktop guys aren’t going anywhere though because the cloud doesn’t take the desktop away, you still need a machine to access it….well not so much. In the future the desktop guys will spend more time working on other peoples kit than the companies. They’ll spend more time ensuring people can work safely for the company with their own kit and less fixing problems as the end users naturally become more adept at fixing problems.

The server huggers

These guys have been the centre of the world for a good few years, they have the hard job – running the infrastructure – occasionally harbouring a small god complex (I am very much guilty). The folks need to make the biggest change to their world, if you are one you need to be learning new skills day after day to keep up. You need to know about virtualisation, what it is and what it isn’t (a magic bullet), you need to know about management technology, you need to know about public cloud platforms and infrastructures and the differences. You also need to start to understand cost models (yuck) and you need to know how to connect both public cloud and private cloud resources. You might not see this right now but people are going outside of your team to get hold of servers to do their job.

There are possibly people within your organisation using a personal credit card to setup a business critical ecommerce system, or store some data in the public cloud…without your governance. It will become impossible to do anything about it because it will be too business critical so you’ll need to focus on connecting and managing it and ultimately on governing it.

The IT Manager

You’re probably going to meetings and being asked for more by the business (or they might have stopped inviting you). Before it’s too late though you need to switch up what your team is doing, get them out from in front of the train and bear their whole weight down on making public cloud work for your business. Why? Because public cloud WON’T work for your business. Not in isolation, you’ve got to couple it to what you do already, those servers and services your IT department is already running at 99.999999% uptime (+ added LOVE). You’re role will be to become the leader of a group of trusted advisors to your business, a group of cloud savvy people who deeply understand the technology and who deeply understand the business.

Every aspect of the business is different the accountants want different things to HR who want different things to marketing and the security guy on the front desk. You can give the accountants systems that don’t require downtime and manual upgrades each year while TAX changes are made – the software provider will do that for you. You can give HR a web based payroll system whereby a huge data send isn’t required every month at pay run time (whilst everyone holds their breath). You can give the security guy secure cloud storage and offload the constant video encoding of security camera footage from his PC to the cloud.

Summary

There are countless more roles and countless better examples but the idea here is to show you that the world is changing. You don’t however need to be under the train since we’re at the right point to get in front and help our businesses make better decisions. There’s no need to loose the technical skills we hold so dear, they just evolve and theirs no need to learn new skills in business analysis or some other discipline it’s just about applying what you know already.

Really the public cloud is a case of learning about the technology and helping your business apply it…that’s the secret sauce. Try Windows Azure, Try Office365 and try what other people offer (then come back )

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Resources for my Azure for IT Pro #uktechdays talk

2011-05-24T19:34:27Z

Just another short post to provide the signposts to some of the resources I talked about in my Windows Azure for IT Professionals session. First up is access to the free Windows Azure trial I mentioned and next is the training course that will take you through using learning how to use PowerShell with Windows Azure (actually it’s blog post that’s part of a series).

You’ll be in need of some tools too, so grab the Azure MMC here or just the PowerShell cmdlets but to use either you’ll need the AzureSDK. You’ll also need some code to deploy so I’d suggest getting yourself along to Planky’s labs on Friday (there are two sessions, Friday morning and Friday afternoon, scroll to the bottom to reg) and you only need to do one!

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Resources from my #uktechdays “Better Together” session

2011-05-20T12:18:26Z

Hopefully for lots of you reading this you’ll be looking for some resources off the back of the turn I’ve just done about DirectAccess and BranchCache. Bellow are some places with some really useful information.

Here’s a video by Kevin Remde that shows setting up BranchCache in hosted cache mode…

…and here’s a second video by Kevin that shows BranchCache running in distributed mode.

And a few months ago I did another demo showing the effect of BranchCache which you’ll find if you view the recording here. In this demo I use performance counters to highlight what’s going on. Here’s a video finally of the config of DirectAccess.

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Resources from my Modern Desktop Presentation

2011-05-23T09:15:00Z

You might have just seen my UK TechDays 2011 presentation which will be available online after the show, however if you didn’t get time to make a note of the resources, here you go:

•Springboard: http://bit.ly/W7SB

•Download Windows 7 Eval: http://bit.ly/smw7trial

•Office 365: http://office365.com

•Windows Collection PCs: http://bit.ly/wincoll

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Licensing and VDI

2011-05-10T13:50:48Z

We were just doing a TechDays online webcast with Sarah Mannion and some questions about licensing just came up…in my back pocket I had some informative videos on just that so I thought I’d pop up a quick post with some pointers:

Virtualisation: Windows Server Licensing

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Why you need to get off Windows XP and move to Windows 7

2011-05-10T11:02:45Z

Windows XP is cutting edge empowering a new wave of personal computing. The year is 2001 and Donnie Darko, The Fast and the Furious, A beautiful mind and Black hawk down are topping the movie charts…a short time later these will all be some of the first movies released on DVD. Since that medium wasn’t available to everyone we released the training materials for Windows XP on VHS cassette (this is of course 4 years before YouTube). It is time to move on because we all know this technology is no longer good enough for your business.

Why isn’t XP good enough? There are many reasons but we are going to concentrate on the ones that actually matter to you . No not your mum, dad, kids, pets and other animals but your users. In 2001 the term “Wi-Fi” did not exist as an accepted term, the Wi-Fi alliance hadn’t created the term and was still the WECA (Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance) so there were no real standard standards for wireless Ethernet and so support in XP is limited. Now you might be thinking that Windows XP got a couple of service packs, the last of which was SP3 released in 2008 and you might well be asking why that uplift doesn’t make Windows XP good enough for today’s world?

Without a doubt Windows XP requires Service Pack 3 to be considered anything like a modern OS but even then it’s a bit like a new coat of paint rather than a new roof or foundations. The big features of XPSP3? Network Access protection, Black hole router detection, CredSSP, additional descriptive text (it’s in the release notes), enhanced security protection, cryptography and activation changes. All essential, none of which matter to your mother, your CEO or Jane in marketing. What does matter to these folks?

Well being able to connect seamlessly from home makes Jane in marketing far happier, that’s where DirectAccess using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2 comes in. She just connects to her home wireless (buy pressing a button on her router for one click WiFi Protected Setup) and DirectAccess connects her to her corporate resources. She didn’t need to mess around with complex WiFi passwords and encryption settings, no checking she has connectivity and initiating a VPN connection.

Dan in IT has life easy with this setup too. Jane’s PC gets anti-malware and patch updates whenever he releases them to the WSUS server because, although Jane’s rarely in the office DirectAccess keeps her connected to the office whenever her computer detects and Internet connection. Dan gets other fringe benefits from having Windows 7 deployed in his organization too, if a user gets stuck with something or encounters a problem all they have to do is type record steps into the Start menu search. Within a few minutes Dan has a recording of the steps required to reproduce the problem so he can trouble shoot it with the built in Problem Steps Recorder.

For me one the biggest additions that we did get with Windows XP SP3 was the addition of Network Access Protection (NAP). If you aren’t familiar with it NAP allows you to protect your network by isolating computers that aren’t up to an acceptable level of updates or malware protection until such time as they can be brought up to scratch automatically or remediated. It’s a technology that it’s easy to see can help reduce firefighting for malware outbreaks.

Obviously those are just a couple of the useful technologies built into Windows 7 but technology like BranchCache helps to streamline operations for branch networks by securely caching frequently accessed data in branches. Windows 7 is however far more about working in a much more modern way; the workflows that your users experience throughout are far easier and built for a modern world. Need to find a document: hit search; need to find a program: hit search; can’t remember the name of a setting you need to change: hit search. I normally explain this by encouraging people to work out how to change mouse buttons over (type mouse or button into search and you’ll have the job done in seconds).

From the point of view of the modern IT Professional it’s useful in two ways, firstly you don’t need to know the name of every setting and secondly your users won’t need to call you for every little thing, they just do what they expect to do today, search for it. With the emerging and accelerating trend of the consumerization of IT where people expect to be able to access everything they need and more on their own terms, including brining their own PCs in you start to see that you need a modern environment. In a consumerized environment you’ll want NAP protecting your network by the way, and you’ll want simple ways to recreate problems on nonstandard kit and you’ll want other things too.

However you might not be in a consumerised environment yet and you might be looking at other smart ways of doing things. So how about Application Virtualisation a feature available with MDOP that allows you to take an application and sequence it so that it can be delivered to any machine, without installation. Sounds good but pop central control onto the top and you’ve got a way of rapidly delivering applications to your computers – heck they don’t even have to have fully downloaded to the computer before the user can start using them. Say what? App-V sequences applications around the way that people use the application, so if it’s not needed immediately it becomes an on demand component that downloads only when needed.

MDOP’s a great addition to Windows 7 because it adds so much functionality for IT Professionals not only can you virtualize applications with App-V but Med-V allows you to virtualize applications that have compatibility issues with Windows 7 (IE6 is a prime example) so that you can provide support to help you over deployment hurdles. Your favorite feature though may well be the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) which extends the troubleshooting functionality available natively in Windows 7 to enable even cooler stuff. Need to reset local machine passwords: DaRT is your friend! Need to pull a hotfix off the machine that’s made things go a bit hinky: DaRT it is. The raft of things it can help with is immense.

So we’ve discussed some new features, some awesome troubleshooting tools and things to make your life as an IT Pro easier how about we do the same with deployment. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit makes your life hear easy and I’m sure you all know how much Stephen loves MDT so I won’t go there but that functionality can be embedded into System Center for a big company.

Windows Intune, which is new to the party adds some excellent options (although not application and operating system deployment) for those running smaller enterprises. The remote assistance on Windows 7 is superlative as is the management of the Windows Firewall, Windows Update and the inclusion of brilliant anti-malware in the subscription price. The big ticket item for me though is that you get a Windows 7 Enterprise license included for each computer with an Intune subscription (and MDOP for pennies more).

I digress though; this is about why you should move away from XP and onto Windows 7. Let’s sum up and get back on track. Windows XP wasn’t built for today’s world, it was built when WiFi wasn’t around, before hardware was cheap and 64-bit wasn’t the norm, before people expected to be able to do at work what they can at home with their PC, before search engines were how you found something out.

No one wants to have to take a document home to make it look cool using spark lines; they want to make it look cool at work. They want to be able to use applications that don’t take hours to install, they want to be able to find things on their PC with search, they want to be able to work where and when they want.

For you though it means more. It means being able to add more value and enable business processes that enable cost saving or revenue generation, you can’t do that scrabbling to support things that are out dated. You don’t want the nasty surprise of someone brining their malware infected home PC in and it infecting the rest of the office, if they bring that machine in you wants it to be secure still. If they’re mobile you don’t want them on the road picking up a virus here, some spyware there and other stuff. Also you owe it to yourself and your career to stay up to date. The business benefits of Windows 7 are abound in countless case studies, but hopefully this made things more real for you of course you’ll find more on Springboard.

This article was originally written for Springboard. Simon May is an IT Professional Evangelist in the UK for Microsoft; he writes, blogs, tweets and presents about Windows and Microsoft cloud technologies but most of all loves a good chat about tech especially if you can work in Windows Media Center. Follow him on Twitter or the UK TechNet blog.

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“I don’t get the private cloud”, “We’re already virtual so we have a cloud”

2011-04-14T13:50:00Z

The title of this article is two made up quotes attributable to no one but that are common reactions I get when I talk to IT Professionals about cloud. Sometimes I think them a strange reaction from technology professionals but really they are both based around a simple misunderstanding; what a cloud and specifically what a private cloud is. The answer though is actually pretty clear cut if you look for a definition, we prefer the NIST definition, since it was independently created.

A cloud is:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

A private cloud is:

The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

So lets take a look at the second of the two statements in the title given the context of these two definitions (if this seems a bit academic that’s going to go away quickly). Virtualisation is a stepping stone on the path to the cloud because the cloud needs us to have a level of abstraction of separation from the workload or service we provide to the *stuff* that’s providing it. I intentionally use the term stuff because it’s vague and non-committal. The stuff can be hardware, that’s the virtualisation scenario that we’re most used to – taking a server running an application and virtualising the server and application together because it’s a pretty simple thing to do. Virtualisation in the sense of a the cloud though can be at a higher level, taking the application or the workload that’s being done and virtualising that removing the specific requirements of the operating system underneath. If you’re familiar with the terms of IaaS and PaaS then you’re probably seeing some parallels, but wait.

All we’ve done is virtualise something, it’s not at this point doing anything to take advantage of other parts of the above definition. Sure it’s using a shared pool of resource but can you rapidly provision and release that virtual server or application? Probably not if the infrastructure hasn’t been built to automatically know about other servers popping up and if it’s not aware of those other servers popping up how do we make them work perfectly together? Manual intervention? It’s not sounding like “minimal management effort”.

The essential next thing required around a virtualised infrastructure to enable it to become a cloud is management software that provides intelligence. It’s time to introduce some new vocabulary to this conversation: fabric. The virtualised *stuff* is the fabric. It’s all the processors, disks, memory, SANs, Switches, racks, power blocks all the stuff that the OS and the application run on. The management software becomes the fabric controller, making decisions about where resource is needed. This fabric controller or management software isn’t the final step though, it’s not easy enough yet to be “minimal management”.

The final step comes from adding a mechanism that allows the end consumers of the services to utilise them without having any appreciation for the stuff that the fabric is managing. We call this a self service portal, pretty self explanatory you’d think. What that self service portal does is abstract the complexity for the consumer of the service but there’s still complexity there and someone, someone with understanding, needs to set things up in a way that they can be consumed. In the case of Windows Azure, Office 365 or Windows Intune that someone is a clever kid inside Microsoft, in the case of the private cloud it’s the IT Professional.

Oh but we’ve not talked about private cloud yet. What’s a Private cloud? Well from the second definition it’s one that’s operated and may be managed by the organisation that uses it and that definition is not mutually exclusive from the above. A private cloud must be highly virtualised, self managing, consumer servicing – if it’s not you have either a highly virtualised infrastructure or a highly virtualised and well managed infrastructure but not a cloud. And no cloud is not just a term to put on something, there’s meaning behind it.

From Microsoft this means having Hyper-V, System Center and a Self Service Portal such as Self Service Portal 2.0

Get your questions answered on Twitter If you’re still confused by it all then I have a recommendation, tweet @ASKTechNetUK with a question and the hash tag #cloudpro and on Friday 15th April at 2pm we’ll answer your question along with lots of others we’ve already received. We, of course, are real people, @simonster, @deepfat and Steve “Planky” Plank.

Get your questions answered by text and blog However if you don’t like the twitter thing, you can text your question to 80809 followed by “cloudpro” and we’ll answer it and you’ll be able to see the answers on this blog after Friday 15th.

Get your questions answered in person Finally, if you prefer the in person stuff we still have capacity (but not much) for TechDays 2011 and we’ll be talking about both the public and private cloud.

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