I run a software company called the Knowledgeone Corporation and we produce enterprise content management software for government and business. Because it takes so long to design, build and test a new product or even a new version, we have to try and predict where the market will be in one or two years and then try to make sure our product RecFind 6 ‘fits-in’ with future requirements.

Years ago it was much easier because we were sure Windows would be the dominant factor and mostly we had to worry about compatibility with the next version of Windows and Microsoft Office. Apple however, changed the game with first the iPhone and then the iPad.

We now need to be aware of a much wider range of devices and operating systems; smart phones and tablets in particular. Three years ago we decided to design in compatibility for iOS and Android and we also decided to ignore Blackberry; so far, a wise move.

However, the prediction business is getting harder because the game is changing faster and probably faster than we can change our software (a major application).

I was just reading about CES 2014 on ZDNet and the major technologies previewed and displayed there. Most are carry overs from 2013 and I haven’t noted anything really new but even so, the question is which of these major trends will become major players during 2014 and 2015 (our design, develop and test window for the next major release of RecFind 6)?

1.     Wearables

2.     The Internet of Things

3.     Contextual Computing (or Predictive Computing)

4.     Consumerization of business tech

5.     3D printing

6.     Big Data

7.     The Cloud

Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of ZDNet, wrote an excellent summary of things to think about for 2014, see this link:

Larry sees China and emerging Chinese companies as major players outside of China in 2014 but I think the Europeans and Americans will resist until well into 2015 or later. Coming on the heels of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 their governments won’t take kindly to having their local high tech industries swamped by Chinese giants. He also talks about the fate of Windows 8 and the direction of the PC market and this is our major concern.

The PC market has been shrinking and even though Microsoft is still the major player by far a lot depends upon the acceptance of Windows 8 as the default operating system. Personally I saw the Windows 8 Metro interface as clumsy and as change for changes’ sake.

I really don’t understand Microsoft’s agenda. Why try to force a major change like this on consumers and businesses just when everyone is happy with Windows 7 and we have all almost forgotten Vista. Windows 8 isn’t an improvement over Windows 7 just as Office 2013 isn’t an improvement over Office 2010. Both are just different and in my opinion, less intuitive and more difficult to use.

Try as I might, I cannot see any benefits to anyone in moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and in moving from Office 2010 to Office 2013. The only organization benefiting would be Microsoft and at the cost of big disruptions to its loyal customers.

Surely this isn’t a wise thing to do in an era of falling PC sales? Why exacerbate the problem?

Smart phones and tablets are real and growing in importance. Android and iOS are the two most important ‘new’ operating systems to support and most importantly for us, browsers are the application carriers of the future. No software vendor has the resources to support all the manifestations of Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, etc., in ‘native’ form but all operating systems support browsers. Browsers have become what Windows was ten years ago. That is, a way to reach most of the market with a single set of source code.

We lived through the early days of DOS, UNIX, Windows and the AS/400 and at one time had about fifteen different sets of source code for RecFind. No vendor wants to go back to those bad old days. When the world settled on Windows it meant that most of us could massively simplify our development regime and revert to a single set of source code to reach ninety-percent of the market. In the early days, Windows was our entry point to the world. Today it is browsers.

Of course not all browsers are equal and there is extra work to do to support different operating systems, especially sand-boxed ones like iOS but, we are still running ninety five percent common source and five-percent variations so it is eminently manageable.

Does Microsoft realize that many developers like us now target browsers as our main application carriers and not Windows? Does it also realize that the Windows 8 Metro interface was the catalyst that pushed many more developers along this same path?

Let’s hope that the new CEO of Microsoft cares more about his customers than the previous one did. If not, 2014 won’t just be the post-PC era, it will also be the beginning of the post-Microsoft era.

The greatest knowledge-loss disaster I can think of was the destruction of the great library of Alexandria by fire around 642 AD. This was the world’s largest and most complete store of knowledge at the time and it was almost totally destroyed. It would take over a thousand years for mankind to rediscover and regain the knowledge that went up in smoke and to this day we still don’t think we have recovered or re-discovered a lot of what was lost. It was an unmitigated disaster for mankind because nearly all of Alexandria’s records were flammable and most were irreplaceable.

By contrast, we still have far older records from ancient peoples like the Egyptians of five-thousand years ago because they carved their records in stone, a far more durable material.

How durable and protected are your vital records?

I mentioned vital records because disaster recovery is really all about protecting your vital records.  If you are a business a vital record is any record without which your business could not run. For the rest of us a vital record is irreplaceable knowledge or memories. I bet the first thing you grab when fire or flood threatens your home is the family photo album or, in this day and age, the home computer or iPad or backup drive.

In 1996 I presented a paper to the records management society titled “Using technology as a surrogate for managing and capturing vital paper based records.” The technology references are now both quaint and out-of-date but the message is still valid. You need to use the most appropriate technology and processes to protect your vital records.

Interestingly, the challenges today are far greater than they were in 1996 because of the ubiquitous ‘Cloud’.  If you are using Google Docs or Office 365 or even Apple iCloud who do you think is protecting your vital records? Have you heard the term ‘outage’? Would you leave your children with a stranger, especially a stranger who doesn’t even tell you the physical location of your children? A stranger who is liable to say, “Sorry, it appears that your children are missing but under our agreement I accept no liability.” Have you ever read the standard terms and conditions of your Cloud provider? What are your rights if your vital records just disappear? Where are your children right now?

Some challenges are surprisingly no different because we are still producing a large proportion of our vital records in paper. Apart from its major flaws of being highly flammable and subject to water damage paper is in fact an excellent medium for the long term preservation of vital records because we don’t need technology to read it; we may say paper is technology agnostic.

By contrast, all forms of electronic or optical storage are strictly technology dependent. What good is that ten year old DAT tape if you no longer have the Pentium compute, SCSI card, cable and Windows 95 drivers to read it? Have you moved your vital records to new technology lately?

And now to the old bugbear (a persistent problem or source of annoyance), a backup is not disaster recovery. If your IT manager tells you that you are OK because he takes backups you should smack him with your heaviest notebook, (not the iPad, the iPad is too light and definitely not with the Samsung tablet, it is too fragile).

I have written about what disaster recovery really involves and described our disaster recovery services so I won’t repeat it here, I have just provided the link so you can read at your leisure.

Suffice to say, the objective of any disaster recovery process is to ensure that you can keep running your business or life with only a minimal disruption regardless of the type or scale of the disaster.

I am willing to bet that ninety-percent of homes and businesses are unprepared and cannot in any way guarantee that they could continue to run their business or home after a major disaster.

We don’t need to look as far back as 642 AD and the Alexandria Library fire for pertinent examples. How about the tsunami in Japan in 2011? Over 200,000 homes totally destroyed and countless business premises wiped from the face of the earth. Tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, fire and wars are all very real dangers no matter where you live.

However, it isn’t just natural disasters you need to be wary of. A recent study published by EMC Corporation offers a look at how companies in Japan and Asia Pacific deal with disaster recovery. According to the study, the top three causes of data loss and downtime are hardware failure (60%), data corruption (47%), and loss of power (44%).

The study also goes on to analyse how companies are managing backups and concludes, “For all the differences inherent to how countries in the Asia Pacific region deal with their data, there is at least one similarity with the rest of the world: Companies are faced with an increasing amount of data to move within the same backup windows. Many businesses in the region, though, still rely on tape backup systems (38%) or CD-ROMs (38%). On this front, the study found that many businesses (53%) have plans to migrate from tape to a faster medium in order to improve the efficiencies of their data backup and recovery.”

It concludes by estimating where backups are actually stored, “The predominant response is to store offsite data at another company-owned location within the same country (58%), which is followed by at a “third-party site” within the same country.”

I certainly wouldn’t be relying on tape as my only recovery medium and neither would I be relying on data and systems stored at the same site or at an employee’s house. Duplication and separation are the two key principles together with proven and regularly tested processes.

I recently spoke to an IT manager who wasn’t sure what his backup (we didn’t get to disaster recovery) processes were. That was bad enough but when he found out it seemed that they took a full backup once a month and then incremental backups every day and he had not tested the recovery process in years. I sincerely hope that he has somewhere to run and hide when and if his company ever suffers a disaster.

In a nutshell, disaster recovery is all about being able to get up and running again in as short a time as possible even if your building burns to the ground. That in fact is the acid test of any disaster recovery plan. That is, ask your IT manager, “If this building burns down Thursday explain to me how we will be up and operating again on Friday morning.”

If his answer doesn’t fill you with confidence then you do not have a disaster recovery plan.

We have all heard and read a lot about the Cloud and why we should all be moving that way. I wrote a little about this in a previous post. However, when we look at specific applications like records management we need to think about the human interaction and how that may be affected if we change from an in-house system to a hosted system. That is, how will the move affect your end-users and records management administrator? Ideally, it will make their job easier and take away some pain. If it makes their job harder and adds pain then you should not be doing it even if it saves you money.

We also need to think about the services we may need when we move to the Cloud. That is, will we need new services we don’t have now and will the Cloud vendor offer to perform services, like application maintenance, we currently do in-house?

In general, normal end-user functions should work the same whether we are running off an internal system or a Cloud-based one. This of course will depend upon the functionality of your records management software. Hopefully, there will be no difference to either the functionality or the user interface when you move to the Cloud. For the sake of this post let’s assume that there is a version of your records management system that can run either internally or in the Cloud and that the normal end-user interface is identical or as near-as-such that it doesn’t matter. If the end-user interface is massively different then you face extra cost and disruption because of the need to convert and retrain your users and this would be a reason not to move to the Cloud unless you were planning to change vendors and convert anyway.

Now we need to look at administrator functions, those tasks usually performed by the records management administrator or IT specialist to configure and manage the application.  Either the records management administrator can perform the same tasks using the Cloud version or you need to ask the Cloud vendor to perform some services for you. This will be at a cost so make sure you know what it is beforehand.  There are some administrator functions you will probably be glad to outsource to the Cloud vendor such as maintaining the server and SQL Server and taking and verifying backups.

I would assume that the decision to move a records management application to the Cloud would and should involve the application owner and IT management. The application owner has to be satisfied that the end-user experience will be better or at least equal to that of the in-house installation and IT management needs to be sure that the integrity and security of the Cloud application will at the very least be equal to that of the in-house installation. And finally, the application owner, the records manager, needs to be satisfied that the IT support from the vendor of the Cloud system will be equal to or better than the IT support being received from the in-house or currently out-sourced IT provider.

There is no point in moving to the Cloud if the end-user or administrator experience will deteriorate just as there is no point in moving to the Cloud if the level of IT support falls.

Once you have made the decision to move your records management application to the Cloud you need to plan the cutover in a way that causes minimal disruption to your operation. Ideally, your staff will finish work on the in-house application on Friday evening and begin working on the Cloud version the next Monday morning. You can’t afford to have everyone down for days or weeks while IT specialists struggle to make everything work to your satisfaction. This means you need to test the Cloud system extensively before going live in production. In this business, little or no testing equals little or no success and a great deal of pain and frustration.

If it was me, I would make sure that the move to the Cloud meant improvements in all facets of the operation. I would want to make sure that the Cloud vendor took on the less pleasant, time-consuming and technical tasks like managing and configuring the required IT infrastructure. I would also want them to take on the more bothersome, awkward and technically difficult application administration tasks. Basically, I would want to get rid of all the pain and just enjoy the benefits.

You should plan to ‘outsource’ all the pain to make your life and the life of your staff easier and more pleasant and in doing so, make everyone more productive. It is like paying an expert to do your tax return and getting a bigger refund. The Cloud solution must be presented as a value proposition. It should take away all the non-core activities that suck up your valuable time and allow you and your staff more time to do the core activities in a better and more efficient way; it should allow you to become more productive.

I am a great believer in the Cloud as a means of improving productivity, lowering costs and improving data integrity and security. It is all doable given available facilities and technology but in the end, it is up to you and your negotiations with the Cloud provider.  Stand firm and insist that the end result has to be a better solution in every way; compromise should not be part of the agreement.

Most of us have probably become more than a little numbed to the onslaught of Cloud advertising and the promotion of the ‘Cloud’ as the salvation for everyone and the panacea for everything. The Cloud is promoted by its aggrandizers as being both omnipotent and omniscient; both qualities I only previously associated with God.

This is not to say that moving business processing to the Cloud is not a good thing; it certainly is. I just wish that the promoters would tone down the ‘sell’ and clearly explain the benefits and advantages without the super-hype.

Those of us with long memories clearly recall the early hype about what was then called ASP or Application Service Processing or even Application Service Provider. This was the early progenitor of the Cloud and despite massive hype it did not fly. The reasons were simple, neither the technology nor the software (application and system) were up to the job. Great idea, pity it was about five years before its time.

Unfortunately, super-hype in our industry is usually associated with immature and unproven technology. Wiser, older people nod sagely and then wait a few years for the technology to catch up with the promises.

As an older (definitely) and wiser (hopefully) person I am now ready to accept that all the technology required for successful and secure Cloud processing is now available and proven; albeit being ‘improved’ all the time so still take care not to rush in with experimental technology.

As with many new technologies the secret is KISS; Keep It Simple Stupid. If it seems too complex then it is too complex. If the sales person can’t answer all of your questions clearly and unambiguously then walk away.

Most importantly, make sure you know all about all of the parties involved in the transaction. For example:

1.    What is the name of the data centre?

2.    Where is it located?

3.    Who ‘owns’ the rack and equipment and software at the data centre?

4.    What are the redundant features?

5.    What are the backup and recovery options?

6.    Is your vendor the owner of the co-hosted facility or do they subcontract to someone else? If they sub-contract is the company they subcontract to the owner or are they too just part of a chain of ‘hidden’ middle-men? It is critical for you to understand this chain of responsibility because if something goes wrong you need to know who to chase.

There are a lot more questions you need to ask but this Blog isn’t the place to list them all. I am sure your IT team and application owners will come up with plenty more. If they don’t, wake them up and demand questions.

Most small to medium organizations today simply do not have the time or expertise to run a computer room and manage and maintain a rack of servers. There is also a dearth of ‘real’ expertise and a plethora of phonies out there so hiring someone who is actually smart enough to manage your critical infrastructure is a very difficult exercise made more so by most business owners and managers simply not understanding the requirements or technology. It often becomes a case of the blind hiring the almost blind.

Most small to medium enterprises also cannot afford the redundancy required to ensure a stable and reliable infrastructure. A fifteen minute UPS is no substitute for a redundant bank of diesel generators and a guaranteed clean power supply.

Why should small to medium enterprises have to buy servers and networks and IT support? It isn’t part of their core business and this stuff should not be weighing down the balance sheet. Why should they be devoting scarce and expensive management time to activities that are not part of their core business?

In-house computer rooms will soon be become as rare as dinosaurs and this is how it should be, they are an anachronism in this time and age; out of time and out of place.

All smart and business savvy small to medium organizations should be planning to progressively move all their processing to the Cloud so as to lower costs, improve service levels and reduce management stress. I say progressively because it is still wise to get wet slowly and to take little steps. Just like with your first two-wheel bicycle, it pays to practice with the training wheels on first. That way, you usually avoid those painful falls.

I like to think I am a little wiser because I still have scars from gravel rash when I was a kid. I am moving my RecFind 6 customers to the Cloud and I am moving my in-house processing to the Cloud but just like you, I am doing it slowly and carefully and triple-checking every aspect. I don’t take risks with my customers or my business and neither should you.

One last thing, I have the advantage of being very IT literate and of having a top IT team working for me so we have the in-house expertise required to correctly evaluate and select the most appropriate technology and options. If you do not have this level of in-house IT expertise then please take extra care and try to find someone to assist who does have the level of IT knowledge required. Once you sign up, it is too late. Buyer’s remorse is not a solution to any problem.