CIO — By Russ McGuire
Remember the mid-1990s? This thing happened called the Internet. Yeah, we technologists know the Internet didn’t happen in the 1990s, it had already been happening in the 1970s and the 1980s, but it really happened in our business about a decade ago.
Depending on your corporate culture, the nature of your business and workforce, and what side of the bed you woke up on that day, when you saw the Internet wave about to hit the shores of your business infrastructure, you either said, “Oh wow!” or, “Oh no!”
For the very few of you who said “Oh wow,” the Internet was all about the unleashing of power. The Web represented a universal client that could be used for unifying access to the business’ core applications. As Internet access became ubiquitous—with everyone having it at home and it showing up in hotels and convention centers (and even coffee shops!), you could connect your employees into the business wherever they could plug in. The Internet’s connectionless model enabled emerging communications tools such as instant messaging, intranets, extranets and a multitude of future ways of collaborating, sharing information, and improving communications. And, oh yeah, the Internet would be a great way to commoditize telecom bandwidth.
For the rest—almost everyone—in the “Oh no!” camp, you saw the incredible dangers that the Internet represented to your business. As departments within your company started connecting systems to the Internet, they were opening up holes for hackers to break into your critical operations. As users browsed the Web or opened e-mail attachments, they unleashed viruses that quickly spread across the enterprise. As employees could get to anything on the Net—they did—sapping productivity and potentially opening the business up to lawsuits. As users increasingly moved out of the four walls of your business buildings, they still expected “desktop” support, stretching your already thin resources. And the demand for precious budget dollars to buy, implement and support rapidly expanding Internet pipes, Web servers and content servers of every flavor, firewalls, anti-virus-spam-spyware software continued to grow, even as IT budgets were shrinking.
Whatever your perspective, the reality is that the Internet has been a huge focus for all of us for the past decade—both in capturing the power of the Internet and managing the danger. But guess what: That’s nothing new. We jumped through the same hoops from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s as our businesses adopted the PC, moving computing power out of the safe, yet-constrained environment of the datacenter onto virtually every employee’s desktop. We spent a decade running to catch the power of the PC to create competitive advantage for our company while wrestling to bring the dangers of the PC under control. That’s our job. It’s what we do, and we’re good at it. So get ready, it’s all about to happen again. The Age of Mobility The PC age was simply the result of a fundamental economic reality. Long ago, Intel founder Gordon Moore made a pretty simple observation. He said something like, “Every couple of years we can squeeze twice as many transistors onto the chips we’re making.” Moore’s Law, as we know it, wasn’t some deep scientific fact uncovered through complex mathematical proofs, it was a simple observation of a clear reality. And yet, the implications are huge.
