I can remember when computing was something that happened at a specific place, and often at a specific time. When I was taking my first pass through grad school, mere students had real-dollar accounts on the university mainframe. For most of my work (let’s hear it for ISAM and VSAM!) I had to submit code and data on punched cards. For the sake of my account, I had to do it when CPU time was cheapest — generally between midnight and 0600. It was a way of doing things that created a certain collegial feeling among the students, but wasn’t so great for things like regular sleep patterns and relationships with non-student humans.

Fast-forward <mumble> years, and we’re seeing the rise of mobile devices and netbook computers. I know that I’m ever more accustomed to not just having a computer available at all times, but to having that computer connected to the Internet and, through it, to various corporate networks. It’s ubiquitous computing in an unlimited sense — not merely being able to connect to desired resources at any time, but being able to connect and do anything from anywhere at any time.

Now, I’ve seen some discussion of how this sort of “always on” network access is impacted by cloud computing concepts, but much less talk about what the expectation of corporate networks that are always there does to the corporate networks themselves — the pressure placed on uptime demands, security, bandwidth, and individual infrastructure components when users don’t want their location or the time of day to matter when t comes to resource access. The fact is that there are no network resources, and no network personnel, not affected by these new user demands, though I’m not at all convinced that the effects are equally distributed across the organization.

What are you seeing in your networks? Are netbooks part of your current or future corporate purchasing plans, or do you see them as not appropriate for general business use? And what kind of impact do you think their widespread use would have on your organization’s network? I’m convinced that these little well-connected devices are going to change user expectations even if they aren’t being directly used to access a particular network — and I think the Interop network is looking more and more like a model for the kind of performance and accessibility that every network will need to demonstrate. What do you think?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS