SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome to the Technology Translator. I'm Vic. Every episode we break down technology, cybersecurity, and AI into plain English for Australian business leaders. Welcome to the podcast. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Technology Translator, where we take business technology, strip away the jargon, and make it make sense. Now, for the next couple of episodes, I'm actually going to take us right back to basics. We're going to talk about some of the fundamental pieces of business technology that sit behind everything we use every single day. And today we are starting with servers and cloud. Because here's the thing: if you're an end user in a business, you probably don't think about any of this. You start a new job, someone gives you a laptop, you might get a mouse, keyboard, a couple of monitors, maybe a headset, someone gives you a username, password, maybe a couple of them, and says, Alright, off you go, you're good. And from your perspective, you are. You open your laptop, you can log in, you open Outlook, you access your CRM. Someone says, Oh, that document that you need is in the F drive. Cool, you open File Explorer, click on F drive, and there it is. Or someone says, hey, that's actually in SharePoint, so you open SharePoint, there it is. You don't necessarily stop and think, where is that file actually coming from? You just assume that F drive is somehow part of your computer. You open an application and it works. You log into a web page and your information disappears. There's this entire technology environment sitting behind what you're actually doing though. And as an end user, you don't need to know about it. You just need it to work. But here's where things actually end up changing. If you're a business owner, a manager, an executive, or someone responsible for making decisions about technology, someone is eventually going to ask you to spend money on this stuff, and potentially a lot of money. Someone's going to tell you that your servers need replacing. Someone's going to recommend moving an application to the cloud. Someone's going to show you an Azure bill. Someone's going to start talking about storage, compute, virtual machines, infrastructure, or migrating workloads. And suddenly you're being asked to approve an investment in technology that you've never actually seen and potentially don't completely understand. And depending on the size of your organization, we're not necessarily talking about just a few thousand dollars. Cloud infrastructure spending for larger organizations can run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars every single month. And so I think if you're going to be sitting at a table making decisions about that, you should at least understand what you're buying. And personally, I didn't. I actually had no idea this stuff even existed when I first started working in technology. I remember eventually finding myself working around cloud infrastructure and having conversations with technical people and thinking, what on earth are these people talking about? Why is there a giant box sitting in the corner of the office? And why does everyone care about this room that's absolutely freezing? What does that box do? Because from my perspective, I could open the CRM and it worked. I clicked on the F drive and my files appeared. I opened an application and it worked. If I was in the office, I could plug my computer in and things worked. If I was at home, I had to log into a VPN. And you know what? I never questioned any of it. But suddenly I realized there is an entire layer of business technology that most of us never see. And so that's what we're going to translate today. What is a server? What does it actually do? What is cloud? Why did businesses start moving from one to the other? What are the costs? What are the security implications? And what should you actually need to understand when somebody starts asking you to make a decision about any of this? And I think the easiest way to understand all of this is to actually go backwards. Because servers weren't invented just because someone thought businesses need a big, expensive computer sitting in a freezing room. They solved a problem. So let's go back before servers. Actually, let's even go back before computers. So imagine you're running a business 40 or 50 years ago. How do you store that information? Paper. Customer records, you've got invoices, files, payroll, contracts, purchase orders, accounting records, everything's written down. You've got notebooks, you've got ledgers, you've got diaries, folders, and eventually you've got filing cabinets. Lots and lots of filing cabinets. And honestly, it works. If I need the Smith customer file, I go to the filing cabinet, find Smith, pull out the folder, and I've got all the information I need. But there's an obvious problem. Only one person can really have that folder at a time. If someone takes it home, no one else has it. If someone puts it back in the wrong place, good luck. And sharing information between people is slow. Then computers came along and suddenly businesses go, this is incredible. We can type documents, we can create spreadsheets, we can run accounting software, we can store customer information digitally. We're getting rid of all this paper. Fantastic. Except we've accidentally created another problem. Because now everyone has their own computer. Sarah has a customer spreadsheet on her computer. John has the finance information on his. Someone else has payroll. And someone else has the latest version of the proposal. We've made everyone individually much more productive, but we've also created a whole heap of little information silos. It's basically the digital version of giving every employee their own filing cabinet and then putting a lock on it. So businesses need another solution. They need a way to keep the benefits of computers while bringing all that information back together. And that is where the server comes in. So we've got all these individual computers, we've made everyone more productive, we've created these information silos, and then we've got servers. Now, here's something I actually quite like about the word server. It's one of those rare technology terms that actually tells you what it does. A server serves things to other computers. That's it. Now, when you hear the word server, you may immediately picture one of those big boxes, flashing lights, fans running, cables everywhere, sitting inside a freezing cold room. And yes, that absolutely can be a server, but a server is really just a computer, just a much more powerful computer than the laptop sitting on your desk. It's designed differently. It's generally built to run 24 hours a day. It will likely have significantly more memory, more processing power, more storage. It may have multiple hard drives and redundancy built into it. So if one component fails, the whole thing doesn't necessarily fall over. But fundamentally, it's still a computer. The big difference is what it's there to do. Your laptop is primarily there to serve you. A server is there to serve lots of people. So instead of Sarah having her files on Sarah's computer, John having his on his computer, we can centralize them. And this is where we start talking about things like local storage. So what does local storage actually mean? Let's go back to the filing cabinet example. Instead of giving every employee their own filing cabinet, we create one central archive room. Everyone puts their information in there, everyone knows how to find it and where to find it. And most importantly, we're not relying on Sarah being at work today because the file we need isn't sitting on actual Sarah's laptop. It's sitting centrally. And that's effectively what businesses are doing with servers. And that's why if you've worked in an office environment for a while, you're probably seeing things like F drive, G drive, S drive, maybe projects, finance, company files, whatever your business happens to call them. Now, here's the important bit. When you're sitting at the laptop and you click on that F-drive, that information may not actually be on your laptop at all. Your laptop is basically saying, Hey server, can you show me what's in F drive? And the server says, Yep, or potentially no. Because servers also help business control who was allowed to say what. Maybe everybody can access the general company folder, but only finance can access payroll, only HR can access employee records, etc. So suddenly we've actually solved two problems. We've centralized the information and we've started controlling access to it. And then the other thing that we I didn't really understand when I first started learning about infrastructure is I thought that servers would just basically be hard drives. Put files on them, people access files, done. But servers can actually do a lot more than that. They can run applications, host databases, manage users, manage permissions, they can help authenticate who you are when you log in. They can run accounting systems, CRM, payroll, and manufacturing applications, websites, all sorts of things. So when I used to sit at my computer, open a CRM, and think, oh cool, here's all the customer information. I wasn't thinking about where that information was coming from. Maybe there was a database sitting on a server somewhere. My computer was just asking for the information and displaying it to me. And that's why servers became such a critical part of business technology. They weren't just storage. For many businesses, they became the central engine room behind almost everything that staff were actually doing. But then we've got another problem. This all works beautifully while you're sitting inside the office. Your laptop is connected to the business network, you plugged it in, the server is connected to the business network, and everyone's happy. But what when you go home or travel interstate? Or if you're in sales like me, who is constantly on the road, your server's still sitting back in the office. And this is where that term VPN became important. VPN stands for virtual private network. And we're going to talk about this more in the next episode when we get into networking and firewalls. But today, think of a VPN creating a secure tunnel back to your office. You're sitting at home, but your computer can securely connect back to the business network and access things almost as if you're actually sitting physically in the office. Your server hasn't gone anywhere, you're just reaching back to it. And for a very long time, that was basically how business technology worked. But owning servers came with baggage. And here's where we need to talk about the physical side of all of this. Because if you're going to own a server, you need to know where you're going to put it. And these aren't necessarily little boxes that you could just chuck underneath someone's desk and forget about. As businesses get larger, they might have racks of servers. And servers generate a lot of heat. So now you need cooling, you need electricity, now you need power. And what happens if the power goes out? Maybe you need backup power. What happens if a hard drive fails? You need redundancy. What happens if the server itself fails? You need backups. You need networking equipment, you need physical security. You need someone actually maintaining all of this. Suddenly, owning the technology isn't just about buying the actual technology. You're maintaining an environment around it. And this is why businesses built server rooms. And this actually brings me to a bit of a conversation I had about a decade ago that has always stuck in my mind. It's been around 2016. I was doing a lot of sales on the road at the time, and I met with an IT manager from a local council. They were building a brand new council building. And we got talking a bit about what they're doing with their technology. And he said something along the lines of, yeah, well, we're actually moving a lot of this stuff to cloud. Great. And then he goes, but I've got one problem. I'm thinking, okay, what's the problem? He explained that they'd started planning this new building years earlier, as councils have a tendency of doing. And as part of the design, he'd planned this amazing server room. It was huge, heaps of rack space, dedicated aircon, power, everything they could possibly need. They'd have room to expand. They'd plan for the future. Except the future changed. Because by the time they were getting into this new building, they'd started moving to cloud. And suddenly he didn't need this enormous enormous server room anymore. So he'd essentially design himself this absolutely beautiful, very expensive, very cold room in the basement. I remember sitting there thinking, well, that's actually quite fascinating, but because technology had changed quickly enough, it affected the design of the physical building. And that was probably one of the first times I really started thinking about the fact that technology infrastructure and physical infrastructure had historically been very connected. Businesses needed offices, partly because their people worked there, but their technology lived there too. Their phone systems lived there, their servers lived there, their network lived there, their files lived there. You couldn't just pick everything up and work from somewhere else. Whereas today, you can start a business without having any almost any physical technology infrastructure at all. You can have 20 people sitting in 20 different houses. You just give them laptops, give them internet, give them the right access to cloud services, and you have a business. And that's a massive change. So let's go into what actually made that possible. And it's the our favorite thing in our lives, the internet. The internet literally just got good enough. Think about the internet 20 or 30 years ago. Slow, unreliable, and definitely not something you'd necessarily want for your entire business depending on every second of every day. If the server is sitting 20 meters away from you inside your office, accessing information could be relatively straightforward. But as internet connections became faster and more reliable and readily more available, businesses start asking a pretty logical question. Why does the server actually need to be in my building? If I can connect to another computer across the internet quickly and securely, why am I paying for the room? The cooling, electricity, hardware, maintenance. Why don't I just get someone else to do that? And that's where cloud really started to make sense. So what actually is cloud? Cloud's one of those words that sounds far more exciting than what it actually is, because cloud is still servers. There isn't some magical floating computer in the sky. There are physical servers, there are data centers, there are cables, hard drives, network equipment. There is absolutely enormous buildings full of this stuff. The difference is it's just not yours. Instead of buying a server and putting it inside your office, you're using infrastructure owned by somebody else. Maybe that's Microsoft Azure, maybe it's Amazon Web Services, maybe Google Cloud, maybe another provider. But fundamentally, you're using someone else's computing infrastructure. And because we've got good internet connectivity, you can access it from almost anywhere. So cloud didn't actually make servers disappear. It just changed where they were and who owns them. So is cloud better? And this is where we get to the question that people do inevitably ask. Should we have servers? Should we be cloud? And I don't think that's actually the right question. The better question is what are the trade-offs? Because there are advantages and disadvantages to both, and every business is different. So let's actually talk through them. Let's start with money. This is probably the first conversation most businesses leaders are going to have. How much is this going to cost me? And there is a misconception that cloud is automatically cheaper. It's not. It can be, but it isn't automatically. Let's use a vehicle analogy. You can go and buy a company car, a large upfront expense, you own the asset. And then you've got maintenance. Service, tires, regro, repairs. Eventually you will need to replace it. Or you can always release the vehicle. Now you're paying regularly, and look, maybe that is a lot easier for your cash flow. Maybe the maintenance is packaged differently. Maybe replacing it is actually easier. But just because you're paying monthly doesn't automatically mean you spent less money after five years. Servers and cloud have a similar distinction. When you buy a physical server, you have a large upfront capital expense. You buy the hardware. Then you've got the ongoing cost of actually maintaining it. Eventually, it will reach end of life. And that's another term worth understanding. And end of life does not mean it's about to explode. It might still work perfectly well. But what it means is that the hardware or software is getting to an age where the manufacturer may no longer support it. The security updates might stop. Replacement parts, you may be turning to eBay to find. The operating system might not actually receive updates anymore. And eventually, keeping it does become a big business risk. So every few years you are potentially looking at another significant investment. Cloud does change that model because instead of buying the infrastructure, you're effectively renting access to it. And that turns a very large capital expense into an ongoing operational expense. And for a lot of businesses, that is very attractive. But the one catch is that the meter does keep running. And cloud costs are not just storage. And cloud bills can become very, very confusing. Because you may be paying for processing power, memory, storage, networking, data transfer, backups, monitoring, security services, disaster recovery, different levels of availability, support. There may be reservations, there may be certain savings plans, but only on certain elements and certain aspects. And depending on what you're running, the numbers can become quite substantial. I have seen Azure environments where the spend is something senior executives absolutely need visibility over because we're not talking a hundred bucks a month. We're talking thousands or millions every single month in technology spend. And I'm not saying that businesses shouldn't be using cloud, but sometimes businesses are getting to the stage where no one's actually gone back and asked, are we still using everything we're paying for? Have we overprovisioned something? Are we paying for computing power that we don't actually need? And cloud optimization has actually become its own discipline where ultimately consultants will come in to go, hey, let's just audit your environment and figure out are you actually using what you're paying for? And do you need to be paying that much? Cloud does give you enormous flexibility, but flexibility without that ongoing management can become very, very expensive. Then we get to the other massive assumption of security. Cloud must be more secure. Again, maybe, but not automatically. Cloud providers do offer phenomenal security, physical security, redundancies, monitoring, huge teams of specialists. But they don't magically secure everything inside the platform. There is a concept in cloud called the shared responsibility model. And the easiest way I can actually explain this is to go back to property. Imagine you rent an apartment. The building manager is responsible for the lift and all the common areas. They're responsible for maintaining the building itself. But if you leave your apartment door wide open, that's not the building manager's fault if someone just walks in and steals your stuff. Cloud works similarly. Microsoft or Amazon or whoever you're using may be responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure, but you're still responsible for things like who has access, what permissions they have, how things are actually protected, whether you're using multi-factor authentication. Security doesn't disappear when you move to cloud. The responsibilities simply change. Reliability and resilience is also something where cloud can have a massive advantage. Imagine trying to recreate what a major data center has with inside your own office. The multiple power supplies, backup generators, network connections, the guards all around, physical security, the fire suppression systems, redundant hardware, 24 7 monitoring, teams of engineers. Could you build it? Sure. If you've got enough money. Cloud does give businesses access to. To infrastructure that would previously have been incredibly expensive for them to build themselves. But there is another side to that. You now really have to care about your internet. And look, we're very lucky at the moment that internet seems to be a very readily available thing, and it very rarely does go down. But you have to ask that question. What if it does go down? If my payment platform, for example, is based on a server that is internet reliable, and that server no longer is working very well, that's where you'll see things like MasterCard or Visa just all of a sudden not work for an afternoon. What we're trying to say is it's not a negative against cloud, but it is there a trade-off right there. You remove one dependency and you're also potentially creating another one right there. Scalability. A huge advantage of cloud is definitely the scalability element. So imagine you own a physical server and your business suddenly grows significantly. You might need more storage, more memory, more processing. So now you're out there buying more hardware. With cloud, it can be as simple as just clicking the button. You need more storage? Click, increase. Need more processing power, click, increase it again. Need to scale back down because things got quiet all of a sudden, potentially, you can do that too. But again, remember what I said about cost. Being able to increase resources easily also means it's very, very easy to increase your bill. One other term that I do want to throw in here, if you are talking about servers, is virtualization, and you will eventually hear it. Virtual machines, VMs, potentially names like VMware or Hyper-V. What does it actually mean? Imagine you bought one enormous house, but rather than having one family living in it, you divide it into separate apartments, different people, different locks, different things happening inside. But physically it's still all the same building. That's essentially what you can do with physical servers. You just segment it into one running a finance system, another one running another application, another one might do something completely different. But underneath, they are sharing the physical hardware. And when cloud environments use virtualization extensively, so someone might say we need another server, and it doesn't actually necessarily mean that someone's ordering another big black box. It may just be simply creating another virtual machine. So here's the funny thing. After all this talk about servers and cloud, most businesses are not relying purely on one or the other. They're usually somewhere in the middle, what we call a hybrid environment. Maybe there might be an old manufacturing system that only works on that one older server that you keep in your offices. But you did move to cloud and you've got Microsoft 365 and you use SharePoint internally. That's a hybrid model. And technology isn't about picking a team. You're not either team server or team cloud. However, there are some organizations who do pride themselves on being completely cloud remote-based organizations. It's more so about deciding what makes sense for your workload, the business, the risk, and the budget. If you want a purely remote workforce, then going cloud makes a lot of sense. If you are in the middle of nowhere, have very limited internet connectivity, and you have a team who mainly works inside an office environment, say a distributor, manufacturer, etc.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Having an on-premise server may actually make sense for you.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

So it's deciding what makes sense for your workload, the risk, and your budgets as well. Now, one thing you have to remember is always backups. Cloud does not automatically mean backup. There are completely different things. Like my analogy of the apartment building before. If you rent an apartment, you would be responsible for having your own contents insurance. Yes, the apartment building would have their own insurance. So say a storm happened and the building blew down or got severely damaged. Yes, they would have their own redundancies. Similar mentality when it comes to cloud storage. Yes, they have redundancies. So say, for example, something bad happened to that full environment, they then are able to go, look, don't worry, we have got a copy of your data somewhere. It may not be in that same facility, it might be in a different state, it may also be in a different country, but they do have backups themselves. What you don't have, however, is if somebody accidentally deletes something, if ransomware hips, if data becomes corrupted, you need to know what happens next. You need to know how often things are actually backed up, where are those backups, how long we retain it. Because even though the overall cloud provider may have those backups, they may not have them as quickly as you need them to actually repair your business. So ultimately, what should business leaders actually be asking? You don't need to understand every Azure service. It's not your job. However, you do need to ask intelligent questions. Why are we doing this? Why cloud? Why on-prem? What are the alternatives? What are the upfront costs and what are the ongoing costs? What does this actually look like over the next five years, for example? What's included? What's not included? Does it scale? How are we securing it? How are we backing it up? Where is our data stored? Is it actually being sent to China? What happens if the system fails? And what happens if we want to leave? How do we get our information back? They aren't technical questions, but they are real business questions. And you need to understand enough about how to make good decisions. You don't necessarily need to know how to actually build the technology. So let's bring all this back up together. We started with paper, had filing cabinets, notebooks, ledgers, everything physical. Computers came along, individuals became productive, but suddenly our information was sitting in silos. Servers helped centralize it. They gave businesses shared storage, shared applications, centralized access. And over time, they became the engine rooms. The internet erupted, and cloud was born because cloud allowed businesses to use someone else's infrastructure instead. And that gave us flexibility and scalability, access from almost anywhere, and access to infrastructure that many businesses could never justify building themselves. But it's also changed the way that we pay, it changed our dependencies, it changed our security responsibilities, and it created an entirely new set of things businesses need to manage. Cloud isn't automatically better, and servers aren't automatically outdated technology. But you do need to understand where technology is going, understand the business problem, understand the trade-offs, and then make the decision. And hopefully someone says, or next time someone says, we need to replace a server or we should migrate this workload into Azure, you're not sitting there thinking, what on earth are these people talking about? Next episode, we're going to delve into networks and firewalls. Mostly looking at if all this information is flying backwards and forwards, how does that actually work? And also, most importantly, what are we allowing in and what are we keeping out? Until then, thanks for listening to the Technology Translator. Thanks for joining the episode. If you do want to follow me on Instagram at all, you can find me under the Technology Translator. If you would like to email me, Vic at the Technology Translator.au. And I guess I wouldn't be doing this properly if I didn't say if you like what you hear, hit the follow button. There will be more of these episodes coming up.