Author: Howard M. Cohen
When you assign someone to do something, what do you want them to focus on; the operation of the tools they’ll use, or the outcome of the work itself? The obvious answer suggests that what we most value from tools is their transparency. The user doesn’t think about the tools. They just focus on their goals. From the very beginning, the definition of cloud computing tells us we need a “layer of abstraction” between the user and the underlying technology to accomplish this transparency.
Fabled French film director Julien Duvivier is credited with being the first to teach that “the camera should not call attention to itself.” To achieve what Samuel Taylor Coleridge first identified as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” the viewer cannot be aware of the presence of a camera. They should simply become absorbed in the immersive experience of the scene.
Ideally, this same concept should be applied to the work people do and the digital tools they use to do it. That is, the computer user should remain unaware of the software, the file system, or any of the technology that enables their work. In the original NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, this is referred to as a “layer of abstraction” existing between the physical layer of the network and the user.
Begin With Your Users in Mind
In the earliest days of “personal computing” and especially early “network computing,” users had to find out what “drive mappings” were available to them and what volumes were available within each of them. Only when armed with that information could they open documents to work on, or save the results of their work in a place where they could find them later.
Opening and saving work. The challenge was that fundamental.
File management platforms like SharePoint went a long way toward improving the user’s plight. But then the confusion was amplified once again by the arrival of cloud computing. Now users had to know much more about the topology of their extended, cloud-connected network before they could do any work.
As hyper-scale cloud platforms like Azure arrived, many utilities and strategies became available that would allow system administrators to make documents and other data more readily available to users.
Someone Has to Know Where Everything Goes
Azure immediately became very useful to large enterprise-scale organizations who had experts on staff who could readily learn how to manage the huge assortment of services and other choices available in the Azure environment. Education was readily accessible and easily absorbed by experienced IT professionals.
Small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB) had a bigger hill to climb. Most did not have IT staff, or at least sufficient IT staff to train people on how to best manage and use the vast resources available from Azure.
Many of these SMB organizations soon came to find that they could vastly improve the value they enjoyed from their Azure subscriptions by engaging experts to set up their resources initially and load their workloads into the platform properly.
Soon, larger organizations realized they were making less-than-efficient use of their most expensive personnel by using them to manage Azure. With external experts available to provide the necessary expertise they could enjoy lower cost of operations along with increased availability of truly talented staff to perform much higher order tasks.
Transparency Triumphs
Once Azure services and resources are properly provisioned and configured, and workloads are properly loaded and integrated, users no longer have need to know where anything is actually located, or anything else about the underlying technology and operations that enable their work. They simply work.
Users are where the operational rubber truly meets the road. The more transparent we can make their environment the less focus they need to put on their tools. That focus can now be directed toward the work itself, which undoubtedly will make them far more efficient and far more productive.
Prior to the arrival of cloud computing companies bemoaned the idea that incorporating computer technology into their business required them to go into the technology business in addition to their actual business. Cloud held the promise of changing that, and reducing the amount of knowledge those companies needed to enable computing in their business.
The missing elements are the absolute need for a layer of abstraction between the user and the technology, and the transparency that abstraction provides. Users no longer see any hint of the technology. They simply press “Start” and get to work.
Turn to Idenxt
The team that developed Idenxt has lived through all this development and have established expertise at building those layers of abstraction for Idenxt clients, so the use of their computing resources is completely transparent to their users.
To learn more, contact us here.