Hybrid approach is the future for Microsoft cloud

Microsoft is “all in” for the cloud according to CEO Steve Ballmer, a message which was underlined recently at the company’s worldwide partner conference in Los Angeles. “Our mission, simply put, is to cloud-optimise every business,” said Server and Tools president Satya Nadella.

All clouds are not equal though. "Beware the false cloud", said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at the 2011 Dreamforce conference. Salesforce.com stands for a PaaS (Platform as a Service) model in which customers share the same multi-tenanted application. This approach offers the greatest efficiency, in terms of both hardware usage and software maintenance.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison, on the other hand, wants you to set up a private cloud using Oracle’s technology, and claims that the multi-tenanted approach is inherently insecure. “Thousands of customers co-mingle their data in the same exact database. It’s really a very weak security model,” he told OpenWorld attendees in 2010. (See Dennis Howlett’s blog for another view of Ellison’s philosophy)

What then is the nature of Microsoft’s cloud? In some ways it is rather odd, or put more politely, distinctive. Take a look at the Office 365 System Requirements, for example.  At a minimum, Windows XP SP3 or Mac OS X 10.5; Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook, or on the Mac, Office 2008 and Entourage.

Does cloud computing no longer imply client-neutrality, and the ability to do your work from anywhere equipped with nothing more than a modern web browser and a broadband connection?

There are two ways of looking at Microsoft’s approach to the cloud. The cynical view is that Microsoft’s cloud conversion is a sham, since it is set up to preserve the company’s Windows and Office cash cows. It is true that if you want to escape from dependence on client operating systems and applications, you should look elsewhere.

The more positive view is that Microsoft is offering the best of both worlds, letting companies get the benefits of hosted infrastructure, including pay-as-you go service as well as integration with existing systems and the option to pick and mix between cloud and on-premise according to individual needs and preferences.

There is truth in both; but it would be a mistake to downplay how big a change this is for Microsoft and its partners. The company’s future now depends on the success of Azure, Office 365, Dynamics CRM and ERP online, and its other cloud initiatives.

Much of the reporting around Office 365 has focused on the Office Web Apps, browser-hosted applications that do work just about anywhere.

That is a mistake; the Office Web Apps are designed for occasional use and one of the less important parts of the product. In fact, Office 365 is aimed specifically at users who would rather continue using desktop Office, who are not ready to abandon local applications and would rather not worry about how well their countless existing documents will render in, say, Google Apps.

A better starting point for understanding Office 365 is Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Install this, and you get single sign-on between your local Active Directory and Office 365, or applications running on Azure. User provisioning, removal, roles, all this can still be managed on-premise. ADFS goes a long way towards removing the disconnect between what is on-premise and what is in the cloud. It means organisations still have a single directory, and in principle applications can be moved from local to cloud-hosted with little disruption.

Microsoft is also talking up private cloud, by which it means its System Center server management tools and virtual servers hosted using Hyper-V or even third-party virtualisation stacks. Undoubtedly this is one of Benioff’s false clouds; but as an approach to getting better hardware utilisation and application scalability, while still maintaining them on-premise, it does make sense. Long-term, there is even the possibility of taking some of those virtual servers and migrating them to run on Azure.

This is the kind of flexibility that Microsoft now stands for. It is inherently a hybrid approach, including local Windows and Office (or maybe a Mac), in most cases at least some local servers, and the ability to migrate gradually onto hosted services if the numbers add up and you can make sense of the security and compliance issues.

Whether or not this is real cloud computing is interesting to debate, but it is an approach that will look attractive to Microsoft-platform businesses who are more inclined towards evolution than revolution.