Cloud computing - Delivering the right services to the right users

In previous posts we have covered how cloud enables organisations to segment users, roles and workloads and to place these in the most appropriate place. Highlight secure workloads can be run on a customers own datacentre, shared services can be consumed from service providers (from a private cloud) and finally public cloud increasingly used for workloads across the organisation.

Cloud also enables greater flexibility in delivery of these services, take for example Office 365. Office 365 is a software as a service solution (SaaS) delivered directly from Microsoft’s datacenters to our customers. It provides a rich communication and collaboration suite encompassing Sharepoint, Exchange & Lync Online along with Office Professional Plus. As with most SaaS offerings these are available on a consumption basis e.g. per user per month. It can be licensed as a suite or as individual services. For example, this means that an organisation can buy 1000 users of Sharepoint, 500 Exchange and 250 of Lync and pay for each of these services per user per month.

Office 365 also recognises two distinct user types – Information workers and Kiosk workers. Information workers as the name suggests create/manage/consume information as part oft their job. They typically have a PC on their desk. Conversely, Kiosk workers typically don't have a PC (or sometimes even a desk), they primarily consume information. An Information worker gets the full capability of Office 365, rich client applications to help them create compelling content, rich collaboration and communication tools to connect across their organisations and with external business partners. Kiosk workers have the capability to consume information via web-based email, mobile devices etc as well as completing forms etc in Sharepoint Online. 

As you would imagine these services are priced appropriately. So rather than have a one-size (fits no-one) approach organisations have the flexibility to deliver the right services to the right users, please see here for more details.

Posted by Nick.