Friday 16 March 2012

Cryer and Clouds

Conference dinner last night, so as usual, a slightly subdued start this morning! After dinner speaker was Barry Cryer, who was very good. Spoke for quite some time, told some great jokes, and managed to get a dig in at many of the people there, including me. Was lucky enough to have a chat with him afterwards, and find out what really happens when they're recording I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue!

First session this morning delivered by Logicalis and was about Cloud, and how it might help us transition to a customer centric experience for students. The technology is there, commercial pressures are there, and now we have the Janet Brokerage to help us procure these services.

Cloud is a mixture of technologies which we need to blend to get a solution that's best for us. Public cloud services are widely used anyway. Private cloud and Hosted cloud solutions are also now mature and need to be considered.

Most young people expect to be able to use technology wherever they are, on whatever device they have, which are increasingly becoming smaller. We need to provide an immersive learning experience. In research, we will have to provide easy access to research resources, again on mobile devices.

Good video here about where the future might be going.

Current way of delivering IT is not sustainable, too controlling. Our approach to the endpoint device that is used to access our services will have to change. We will have no control over it. I think we've already gone down that route. Connectivity is key. Has to be ubiquitous, but high quality and high density. No good having wireless coverage if it doesn't work. Network design is critical to deliver media rich services. Then we have to design services so they can be delivered to any device.

Real requirement for innovation in IT is in risk based security. We have to look at trust mechanisms, methods of authentication and assess risks. Our security gateways will have to change. Again, taking a risk based approach.

So, we need to give a rich experience to our users, to their own devices using risk based security and over ubiquitous high quality networks. To do this, we will have to utilise cloud much more than we are doing now.


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1 comment:

John Milner said...

Well said Chris. It's interesting to remember that when I wrote the IS strategy for Cambridge in 2002 one of the key requirements for services and applications was to be "access agnostic" i.e the services and applications were to be accessible anywhere, anytime, any device.

People thought I was bonkers :-)