Now that the likes of Samsung and Acer have launched their versions of Google’s Chromebook – the stripped down, online optimised laptop-alike systems which are specifically designed to work as a near-permanently online client system for the web – the question of the types of user and market that might find them useful, and their possible impact on service levels, automatically come up for consideration.
There is an obvious attraction for the machines as a consumer item, particularly in those countries where there is already a high level of online consumer activity. It could indeed find itself a major breakthrough leader in many of the developing countries where there is little legacy in fixed line communications infrastructure.
Here, the main issues will likely turn up in networking infrastructure, particularly in there being sufficient infrastructure to provide the bandwidth these devices are likely to require. When it comes to business use however, the operational model could be something of a curate’s egg.
It will be good in parts for business users – from SMBs to large enterprises, but could also stumble over some difficult problems. That is the view of James Peel, Product Manager at internet monitoring company, Opsview.
When it comes to managing large numbers of deployed Chromebooks there is a high potential for management problems, particularly because many of the applications and services that businesses use are themselves constructed from other applications, services and utilities already available online. Peel argues:
He feels that the arrival of Chromebooks will bring some significant changes to the way IT is utilised, not least in the growing demands it will put on monitoring:
Peel sees the most urgent issue is for Opsview to concentrate on the data-collection needed so it can build a comprehensive picture of an increasingly complex set of interactions between data and widely scattered processes and resources:
The arrival of Chromebooks does open up the question of support for a business tool that is geared to totally online operation. So it is liable to change the IT department support model quiet significantly – it could even reduce the workload as the things can be lost or thrown away and it won’t matter, the data and management is run from the Cloud, not on the device.
But it does mean businesses will have a greater responsibility to ensure the service is always available, for with service loss could come serious damage to the business.
The majority of businesses, of course, fall into the category of SMBs, and the idea that storage is totally in the Cloud will be an obvious two-edged sword for them. There will be the continued fear for many of them that their data will be a much greater risk because it is not on-premise. This will be balanced by the fact that storage in the Cloud, using Google’s copious facilities, will undoubtedly be a good deal cheaper – both in brute hardware and management/staff training terms – than adding new storage facilities.
A side issue here is that the nature of the data to be stored is in transition. The content is becoming far richer, which means that file sizes are growing exponentially. Documents that were `n’ Kilobytes are now `n+’ Megabytes in size, and that is without taking into consideration the far greater number of graphically rich files that businesses now need to store.
This factor alone could prove to be an issue for larger enterprises. Many of them will not sanction the use of Google for storage – and with Chromebooks that won’t be just the storage of final, completed documents and files but also the intermediate saves that normal working entails. If they are not committing storage to Google they will either have to search very carefully for alternative storage service providers that meet their particular criteria, or get into the world of establishing significant private Cloud storage resources of their own.
In addition, the fact that every transaction of any significance – the update of a single line of a single record in a database, for example – will be conducted over the Internet is liable to pose some enterprises with problems.
Some will certainly be concerned about latency issues, which could stall some time-dependent or sequence-dependent transactions, particularly if the wider public network is part of the delivery chain. Some will be concerned about the additional storage overhead this operational model will create, not just in terms of brute capacity but also in terms of additional management layers needed to determine which types of data need to be stored where and how. It could also open up a can of worms in terms of audit trails of individual transactions.
Just because it could be possible to accurately show which member of staff did what to a specific file, and exactly when, some companies or customers may demand such services are utilised. I can imagine staff at some companies starting to feel quite threatened that their workload could be the subject of the ultimate in time-and-motion studies.
There are upsides for enterprises in the arrival of Chromebooks of course, particularly where they are physically organised on the campus model. Here, the availability of high bandwidth network infrastructure, both wired and WiFi, can open the possibility of Chromebooks becoming the de facto thin client for all staff. Only those with definable `road warrior’ jobs would be able to make sufficient case to warrant having a traditional laptop system as well.
Peel feels this could be a key selling point for some enterprises:
This could then give enterprises good control over the majority of the work being undertaken by staff, plus an excellent justification for building a powerful private Clouds environment in which they can operate. The same logic will, of course, apply to many educational establishments as well.
One Cloud industry sector that could do particularly well from the Chromebooks approach is SaaS. Here we have a group of service providers that are specifically geared to conducting all processing and storage online and under central management control. For them, having customer staff members using PCs is often going to be an overkill at the client end, and so a `lite’ client device such as a Chromebook looks like a good option.
Indeed, it seems such a good option on the face of it that I feel it may not be long before a SaaS provider ventures into the `Gillette/Kodak’ model of marketing – giving away the means of consumption in order to promote greater uptake of the consumables. I think giveaway Chromebook client systems could become a widespread marketing tool in the more common applications areas of SaaS, as well as the larger service aggregators as they develop and grow.
On balance, therefore, I feel that the Chromebooks idea is a very good direction to take for many businesses, both small and large. It complements many Cloud-base services extremely well. But because of the pressure the model can put on the internet, in terms of bandwidth demand, consequent latency problems that might occur and the fact that most users have little or no knowledge of or control over what sources are providing the services they consume, it is a direction with the caveat `take care’ writ large beside it.
Go that way, but don’t rush. And monitor what is happening as it happens. If you don’t and a service dies you are never likely to work out why, or how it happened. And businesses can’t be run that way.
