Friday, April 24, 2015

Cloud and Mobile Devices are the Future

I just read an article that Microsoft's new CEO, Satya Nadella is leading Microsoft aggressively into cloud technology and services refocusing Microsoft away from the PC.

I happen to believe he is on the absolute right track.  At present the vast majority of corporate employees use a laptop or some still use desktop PC's as their workstation of choice.  I think that Mr. Nadella is 100% on the right track.  Many companies are moving all of their Microsoft Office applications to Office 365 and storing all of their Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other documents in the cloud...

Apple is equally competitive with their iCloud offering storing output from their Pages, Keynote, and Numbers products in the cloud.

Most corporate systems utilize a web interface today which is immediately accessible via a mobile devise and true mobile applications are rapidly spreading throughout the corporate world.

The device of the future will be a tablet with a reasonable size screen and the ability to connect to a large monitor or monitors on a desktop but also portable to move to a meeting or travel anywhere with the user of the device.  I think these devices will be equipped with optional keyboards to insure ease of use.   A corporate employee should be able to use their smart phone or even perhaps Google Glasses or Apple watch...  for total portability.

Look at the advantages that cloud based technology along with mobile devices bring to the corporate world:


  • No lost data!  No data exists on a local device and all data from reminders to corporate documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, etc. live on a shared server.  When an employee leaves the company their documents are preserved and can be index and shared to those who need them.  The cloud protects against local disk failures or other local disasters including stolen laptops...  
  • Increased security!  Only people authorized to access your data can get to it.  If the device is stolen there is nothing of value on the device to the their other than device itself.  
  • Insuring that your employees use current versions of your applications.  You can implement change management like that used by Apple or Google to automatically update the apps stored on the devices when changes are published!  No more worrying about what version a user is using.  
Portability, improved security, elimination of risk and insurance that everyone is on current software are huge benefits to corporations today.  The high speed office networks and wifi connectivity all ready exists in most corporations today to support PC's.  

BTW, did I mention the reduction in human support costs by getting rid of PC's?  What are you waiting for?  Cloud based systems with mobile devices can save you time money and headaches!