Use Cloud to gain focus

I feel slightly guilty as I write this article - but only slightly. I’m typing this on an old Macbook Air, and every now and then it reminds me that I haven’t backed up the hard drive for nearly a year. Whenever it does that, I feel a twinge of guilt - and then I dismiss the reminder.

The reason that I only feel slightly guilty is that it’s been a long time since that reminder mattered. I started making the shift from local storage to Cloud storage a few years back, and started making the shift from locally installed applications to Cloud based applications a year or so ago. While I’m typing this on a Macbook Air, I’m using Google Docs on a Chrome browser - and could be doing that on a range of devices. (And this is when I point out that, although I work for Google and enjoy using all of Google Workspace in my day job, the views in this article are my own.)

I only fully began to understand the significance of this shift when I was making the last backup I ever made on this machine. I had just plugged in my external hard drive and was watching it grind through its data transfer, when I wondered how many files were being backed up which were not already stored in some form of Cloud storage, or were part of the OS or a local application which I no longer used. All of my mails were in Gmail, my documents were in docs, my notes were in Evernote, my code was in Github, and the few remaining files were copied to Drive. All I was doing by taking my backup was unnecessary infrastructure management - including transferring the removable media to a remote storage location by unplugging the hard drive, walking across my study and putting it into a drawer.

Once I had realised how unnecessary my backup activity was, it made me realise two things about my personal shift to the Cloud which can also be applied to enterprise Cloud adoption.

First, it made me realise that my faithful (albeit aging) Macbook Air was now doing a different job to the job that it used to do. When I used to carry that machine around, I was carrying a faithful companion which not only allowed me to do my work, but which also carried all my data, all my work, all my projects. I needed to look after it, because if I lost it, it would be irreplaceable. As I shifted to the Cloud, that machine became just one window on my data, my work and my projects, which all had an existence entirely independent of that machine. But there were many more windows available - I could look through any other laptop, my iPad or even my phone and see the same material (I am making my final edits to this article on a Chromebook).

Although many enterprises have adopted technologies such as VDI, roaming profiles and shared drives to reduce dependence on individual machines, we still tend to treat those machines as if they are the essential and private property of each user. Data still sits on the hard drive, and the loss of a device can still be catastrophic. Fortunately, Cloud based collaboration tools now offer enterprises the chance to make these machines nothing more windows on what really matters - data, knowledge and means of connection with other people.

Second, my backup epiphany made me realise that I was not only spending time on activities which I didn’t need to do, but I couldn’t do them as well as the Cloud services I was using. Copying data to an external hard drive on an occasional basis and stashing it on the other side of my study was a poor alternative to the backup and replication which was already happening on Cloud based services - without me having to do anything. The time I saved when I stopped taking backups was time that I could spend focusing on other work.

Enterprises have similar opportunities as they move to Cloud. As they adopt a wider range of managed services, they find that work that they used to do is now built into those services. This doesn’t mean that they have no work to do - the amount of work required to digitally transform companies is effectively infinite - but it does mean that they can focus on the work which others don’t do and which differentiates their companies.

In my personal life, Cloud helped my focus on the data which mattered most to me and the work which mattered most to me. It holds the same promise for enterprises too.