RIP Server
It’s time to breath the air of cloud connection!
A very interesting article hit my desk this morning, it is by Peter Coffee – VP for strategic research at salesforce.com.
I thought is would be worth sharing. The highlights are as follows:
Sometimes, it’s hard to tell when a novelty becomes a trend or a trend becomes the new normal. The era of the on-premises server is clearly behind us, it is now time to enable people to work from anywhere at any time.
This is becoming more important than keeping them tied to an internal server platform going nowhere. As one CEO recently asked his facility manager, “We spent how much to put state-of-the-art Wi-Fi in this building? And I get more bandwidth on my 4G LTE smartphone?”
Cloud servers allow many more complicated tasks that we want to be able to perform, like real-time collaboration to occur seamlessly. When you own your own servers, collaboration requires you to simulate the sharing that a cloud makes completely straightforward. If something happens on Department X servers in one building, and something related happens on Department Y servers elsewhere, it takes a mountain of middle-ware to make it look as if a shared process is taking place in a shared space. This is more expensive, more failure prone, and can’t possibly be more effective than the real thing: an actual, single, concurrently accessible work product on the shared foundation of a cloud service provider.
What we are seeing today in business, education, government, health care and every other institution. Those who shed the dead weight first get more done, sooner and better and at less cost.
RIP, the server. You were what we needed when there was no alternative. You’re now a relic of a time that’s almost unrecognisable today; you represent a cost that’s unaffordable, and unreasonable, for all future time to come.
Thank you Peter for your insight.