Managed Services with IT in a cloud

" I was working on a very important document for a case. There were recording of pleadings and I had laid out my strategy for the next stage of negotiations. Then I had a crash! Blue screen of death! Aaargh!!! I hadn't saved."

Has this happened to you? Have you or your colleagues had a computer crash at the most inconvenient times? No time is actually convenient but according to Murphy's law any problem that you get will at the precise moment that you have an entire and important presentation ready for a crucial meeting in 30 minutes, and you don't have a back-up.

(Murphy's law 1. If anything can go wrong it will. Murphy's law 2 If nothing can possibly go wrong, something is going to. O'Reily's observation: Murphy was an optimist!)

Well Murphy has a distinct and powerful influence over the world of IT. Over the past 30 years computers have come to dominate our everyday lives. Initially a computer was a giant of a thing, locked in an air-conditioned room somewhere with all these flashing LEDs and attended to by a bunch of weird people who spoke a special language that seemed to bear no relation whatever to English. However they did produce reports that more or less told us what they wanted us to know. We became enslaved to operating according to the capacities of the machine and the abilities of the programmers.

And then the PC revolution started. Small computers were soon being placed on everyone's desk. But there were problems with software until Bill Gates and co. got DOS as a standard and then presented the world with Windows. This released many of the programmers from the mundane tasks and allowed each computer operator to be his own programmer.

But remember Murphy. As computers got smarter and software became more available so too did the problems increase. Very soon it became apparent that computer support was not a dying but rather a growing business. Many businesses found they needed network support more than ever because although a Local Area Network (LAN) seems simple enough it isn't!

So many businesses find they are still employing IT staff or are else calling out consultants when things go wrong, which they do more often than one would like. (Murphy again) These call outs may be for something as trivial as a clash between one version of a software program and another older version that is on loaded on the server. But they are call outs and cost time, aggravation and of course the expensive consultants call out fee.

That is the appeal of Managed IT services, where everything resides in the cloud of the managed services machines. When I say everything I mean everything. Many of the desktop computers become nothing more than dumb terminals with the software residing in the cloud, when all work is automatically backed up as it changes and where the network is under the constant 24/7 supervision of people whose business it is to ensure that the system is constantly up and running.

The advantages are a big reduction in capital equipment and purchases of software and instead one pays only for the usage. As one knows most software like MS Office is underutilized. Whether the operator writes only one letter and does a little spreadsheet for personal expenses he has still had to buy an expensive bit of software that includes many items he doesn't use. With the managed IT services running a cloud many of these will no longer be necessary.