How do you use the cloud?

[mangocrazy]

One (fairly Luddite, I agree) way I use the cloud is to keep draft emails open and just update them with reminders of what to bring/take to/from France and use one as a kind of to-do task list. When I think of something I need to buy in the UK to bring to France next time I just jot it down. I'm sure there are much more sophisticated ways of doing it...

[DefTrap]

For personal use cloud is a godsend, bollocks to maintaining files locally and the inevitable hd fail.
At work we use a mix of onprem, azure and other more specialist cloud. It won't be long before it's all cloud.

[Greenman]

I support numerous MS 365 cloud tenancies at work.

We have moved all of our schools into these tenancies over the past year or so. It's the way forward but One drive can be a right pain in the arse especially if people create shortcuts to the drives via a browser on teams. We sync the drives down from the cloud so they show in file explorer but if the user also clicks the 'create shortcut' button in the browser it fucks over all the synced drives and there is no easy way of getting rid of the shortcuts.

I have spoke to MS numerous times about a recommended resolve for removing them but they don't have one! - It's a total minefield when deleting the shortcuts as you can potentially delete all the data in the cloud when you do, i really don't understand why the option is there to create these shortcuts, no matter how many times i tell users not to create them, they still do then come running to me when the files aren't syncing anymore, and of course, i need to resolve the issue in 10 minutes as there is no way they can be without their laptop for any longer!

I don't really have any personal data in the cloud, i don't really have anything to put up there. I do backup my music to google drive though, i have full Google Workspace tenancies around my schools we use with google classroom so i just create a @greenmansmusic account which has unlimited storage space and whack all my music up on it.

I'd say that in maybe 3 years time, most work environments will be moved to cloud, it also means in some cases the company no longer needs to provide office space and can have their employees working from home.

[dern]

I'd say that in maybe 3 years time, most work environments will be moved to cloud, it also means in some cases the company no longer needs to provide office space and can have their employees working from home.

We were able to do exactly that when the pandemic hit.

[weeksy]

I'd say that in maybe 3 years time, most work environments will be moved to cloud, it also means in some cases the company no longer needs to provide office space and can have their employees working from home.

We were able to do exactly that when the pandemic hit.

I've been to the office twice since then.

Once for beer, once for a new laptop

[mangocrazy]

I have to say the responses to this question have opened my eyes. I knew cloud usage was growing exponentially, but never knew quite how pervasive it is now. I guess that having been retired for nearly two and a half years I've lost touch with how business usage has grown. Who are the major players in cloud services - the usual suspects (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) or are there others?

[dern]

I'd say that in maybe 3 years time, most work environments will be moved to cloud, it also means in some cases the company no longer needs to provide office space and can have their employees working from home.

We were able to do exactly that when the pandemic hit.

I've been to the office twice since then.

Once for beer, once for a new laptop

Similar for me too, only half a dozen times.

Everything is so mobile I could do all my work from the carpark outside AP Engineering while the Aprilia was being sorted... attend meetings, do work online, all the usual stuff just by connecting the laptop to the mobile network and on to the cloud servers.

[dern]

I have to say the responses to this question have opened my eyes. I knew cloud usage was growing exponentially, but never knew quite how pervasive it is now. I guess that having been retired for nearly two and a half years I've lost touch with how business usage has grown. Who are the major players in cloud services - the usual suspects (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) or are there others?

Pretty much those.

[mangocrazy]

With the benefit of hindsight, Covid came along at pretty much the perfect time to turbocharge uptake of cloud services. They were heading that way anyway, but got an extra boost with the huge swing to remote working. The network infrastructure was already proven and just needed scaling up for the extra volumes.

Almost like it was planned...

[wheelnut]

I have to say the responses to this question have opened my eyes. I knew cloud usage was growing exponentially, but never knew quite how pervasive it is now. I guess that having been retired for nearly two and a half years I've lost touch with how business usage has grown. Who are the major players in cloud services - the usual suspects (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) or are there others?

It depends. Most of our smaller customers (who don’t have need for sql etc) we’ve migrated to sharepoint and azure AD ditching on-prem tin.

The larger customers who need server space are mainly still on-prem. Azure is still not cost effective when you compare it to on-prem. We use wasabi for some backups but would only really use MS or AWS for live data.

[Slenver]

I have to say the responses to this question have opened my eyes. I knew cloud usage was growing exponentially, but never knew quite how pervasive it is now. I guess that having been retired for nearly two and a half years I've lost touch with how business usage has grown.

I'd say that, for work, I've been using cloud stuff extensively for maybe 10-12 years everywhere I've worked. The more 'digital' the company, the more likely they are to use these kind of things. Banks, for example, might be quite slow in adoption, but smaller, newer companies have been using nothing else for years and years.

Who are the major players in cloud services - the usual suspects (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) or are there others?

It sort of depends - a fair difference between corporate use (MS, Amazon) and personal use (Apple, Google, Dropbox etc). But these are the hosts... there are a million independent apps that end users can use, for either work or play. These will mainly use something like Amazon or Apple for hosting, but that's entirely opaque to the user.

To give a specific example. My job is in digital design and user experience. I work in various companies, from tiny to enormous, and will work with wider digital teams of product managers, developers, marketing, business managers etc...

In all these companies, between 60 and 99% of communication is done in Slack, a messaging app, with most of the rest in email. The more 'modern' the company, the more it's entirely in Slack with minimal email.
Design is done in Figma
Managing the work is done in Jira or Trello
Sharing ideas/brainstorming (ugh) is done in Miro
Big corporates tend to use Microsoft 365/Teams for video meetings, storing project files etc, but it's generally disliked
Small companies, who decide their own software, will use Google Drive for file storage and then Slack or Zoom for video calls

All the above is cloud-based and in fact, every single one of those services can work in a browser even, though usually better in a standalone app. And actually, not much of the above has changed much in the last 5 years at all, apart from Figma becoming dominant for design, and the rise of MS 365 and the dreaded Teams.

[Greenman]

With the benefit of hindsight, Covid came along at pretty much the perfect time to turbocharge uptake of cloud services. They were heading that way anyway, but got an extra boost with the huge swing to remote working. The network infrastructure was already proven and just needed scaling up for the extra volumes.

Almost like it was planned...

Don't get me started...

[mangocrazy]

I'd say that, for work, I've been using cloud stuff extensively for maybe 10-12 years everywhere I've worked. The more 'digital' the company, the more likely they are to use these kind of things. Banks, for example, might be quite slow in adoption, but smaller, newer companies have been using nothing else for years and years.

Yeah, I worked for a major High street bank until July 2020 and they had only really started getting into cloud services in the previous year or so. I'm completely out of the loop now (and glad to be), so I don't know if the banks are entrusting their 'crown jewels' customer data to the cloud or keeping it in-house. I imagine the FCA would have a view on that, anyway.

But you'd routinely hear senior managers spouting about 'cloud', 'agile' and other phrases they knew nothing about but that made them appear knowledgeable and savvy. The more things change the more they stay the same...

[Mr. Dazzle]

Banks may not use the cloud as we understand it, but they've got some pretty feckin' massive data centres all of their own right?

Both my rentals worked for IBM my whole childhood, mostly on banking systems. I've had a couple of summer jobs there and seen the size of the huge, freezing cold rooms full of big black boxes (computers, one assumes )

[mangocrazy]

Banks may not use the cloud as we understand it, but they've got some pretty feckin' massive data centres all of their own right?

Both my rentals worked for IBM my whole childhood, mostly on banking systems. I've had a couple of summer jobs there and seen the size of the huge, freezing cold rooms full of big black boxes (computers, one assumes )

Absolutely. I've worked in and around data centres since the mid 70s (although they weren't called that then), and they've always been massive air-conditioned silos that only a few people were ever allowed into. In the early days operators worked in the computer halls, but by the mid 80s they'd been moved out into what was normally termed 'the Bridge' (a reference to Star Trek, obvs).

Banks have the biggest data centres (outside of cloud providers I guess, these days) and everything is resilient, which normally means two of everything. This literally applies to everything - servers, network infrastructure, disk arrays, the lot. Last place I worked at had 3 mainframes at its main site and 3 more at its backup site. Plus one that was entirely standalone and had to be updated on site.

But what intrigues me is to what degree the banks have migrated their core data to the cloud, if at all. I doubt very much that the information will be in the public domain, so I may need to tap up some old contacts to find out. Even if they have, then they will doubtless still retain humungous disk farms on site.

[cheb]

Banks may not use the cloud as we understand it, but they've got some pretty feckin' massive data centres all of their own right?

Both my rentals worked for IBM my whole childhood, mostly on banking systems. I've had a couple of summer jobs there and seen the size of the huge, freezing cold rooms full of big black boxes (computers, one assumes )

Could have been a morgue.