It's storage, stupid!

 Recently there's been some posts here and there about abandoning Big Tech (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc) and going it alone.

Partly driven by distaste for Big Tech, and partly out of concerns about digital sovereignty, and it's usually accompanied by a lot of handwringing about what alternatives to choose.

Well, I've been there. Inadvertently, but I've been there.

In the nineties I managed a PC desktop service for a university in England.

This included both student computer labs and (some) staff and admin desktops.

Budgets were tight, computers were relatively expensive, so we had a cost containment exercise. One of the constraints was the cost of software licences from Microsoft. To provide an office suite solely using Microsoft products would put a hole in the budget.

So we didn't.

We went out and bought a whole lot of alternative products with considerably lower licensing costs.

What eventually helped kill off our strategy was that the file formats we were using were incompatible with those used by the rest of the planet - it's no use writing documents in WordPerfect if you need to exchange them with colleagues elsewhere who use Word.

So, the first lesson is that whatever software suites you choose as your standards, they've got to seamlessly interwork with the default formats, which these days means Microsoft Office.

It probably doesn't matter what you choose, as long as it's well supported and unlikely to disappear. If it was me I'd start with Libre Office and make regular donations to keep the project funded, after all I wouldn't be paying for all these Office licences.

The other thing that helped kill using a Microsoft light desktop was the rise of the laptop.

We had a pretty good storage solution in place using large NAS servers, and once people had authenticated they could connect to their storage, but storage was rationed as the hardware to provide a robust solution was expensive and providing a suitable backup service even more so.

Networking wasn't universal these days, so what usually happened is that people would keep their files locally on their machine, and if you were lucky back them up to some managed central storage now and again.

And then Microsoft started bundling Skydrive, now OneDrive, with office, and suddenly laptop users found they didn't need central provision anymore.

So, when companies like Microsoft, Google and the rest offered to provide storage and backup (as well as email) for a competitive cost, universities and large corporates jumped at it - it was cheaper and we didn't need so many of these pesky IT people.

And that has given us the world we have today.

And let's face it, it works reasonably well. 

I've used OneDrive extensively for cataloguing and documentation exercises and to share the data with the project sponsors.

I've also used OneDrive to exchange documents between Linux and Windows machines in a work situation - yes Linux is fiddly and not for everyone, but it can be done.

Equally, you can use a lightweight distraction free machine for offline research and documentation and then upload your work at the end of the day, or if that's not possible, save a copy to a USB stick as  a backup.

But the thing we always come back to is storage. 

We are assuming in all our designs reasonably pervasive internet and access to storage. And yes, we can use non Microsoft office suites as an alternative, and these days, if you choose the right distro, changing from Windows to Linux is no more complex than changing from Windows to a Mac.

The elephant in the room is storage provision. Most organisations have outsourced storage (and its accompanying services like backup and consistency checking) to Big Tech for entirely sensible reasons.

If you truly want to free yourself from being dependent on Big Tech for reasons of digital sovereignty, you need to provide an alternative storage infrastructure at scale. And that is neither cheap, nor easy...