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Businesses that make most of their money selling products to other businesses (B2B) usually categorise their current and prospective customers by the number of people they employ. This makes sense if you are selling chairs to banks; one seat per employee bottom and a few extra (perhaps harder) for customers. For information technology (IT) vendors, counting employees can be misleading; after all not all employees use computers—do they? At one level this is true as not every employee sits at a desk with a PC in any industry, although increasingly many are sitting in a van or some other remote location with a laptop or handheld computing device. The increase in the use of IT remotely by both white- and blue-collar workers has certainly led to higher PC penetration rates amongst employees in many businesses. For the IT industry, even counting employee PC usage is becoming superfluous because of the growing number of devices that businesses rely on that are not assigned to one user or another and often don’t even look like computers. Such devices are often used directly by customers that may eschew technology and consider themselves computer illiterate.
Banks have lived with this for years with their ATM networks, as have retail outlets with increasingly sophisticated point-of-sale (PoS) devices—tills, or cash registers, if you prefer. The number of such devices is growing fast and businesses of all types make more and more use of a range of off-the-shelf or purpose-built devices linked by networks that allow them to interact with their customers, often directly.
As businesses come to rely more and more on these networks the impact of downtime becomes more serious; disgruntled customers, unproductive employees and lost sales—all unacceptable. Keeping these networks running is a job for specialists that many businesses do not have in-house, so the job of managing these seemingly unmanageable networks, as well as conventional PC ones, is often outsourced to specialist managed service providers (MSPs). Working with MSPs is cost effective, especially for smaller businesses, as MSPs can apply economies of scale to manage multiple networks of devices for various customers and invest in the appropriate skills and tools to do so. MSPs have also built up expertise in remote systems management, which is the only practical way to keep their customers’ often vast networks going. Those networks are in the cloud, a term increasingly used to define the internet and associated private networks that link to it. Managing devices in the cloud requires tools that work in the cloud, so, just as with many other software applications, system management tools are moving online and, instead of running the software in-house, tools are being offered as a service (software as a service/SaaS). A big benefit of this approach is that this allows MSPs and their customers to share and work off the same data sets wherever they happen to be.
Specialist computer networks There are those, even in the advanced economies, who believe they can sidestep technology. PCs, the internet, email etc. are not for them. Yet think of the average day of anyone living in a modern city (which is now over half the world’s population). Just getting to work can be an unrecognised tangle with ICT.
Arrive at a railway station and the first thing we all do is check the electronic displays to see if the trains are on time and which platform to go to. We are annoyed if the screens are blank and it is necessary to track down a member of staff to ask—who probably will not know any better as they rely on the same information screens. If all is well, we proceed through electronic ticket gates, which ensure we have a permit to travel. In some cities we may use a frequent travel card, the system automatically topping up cards from our bank accounts when credit runs short and recording travel history for subsequent review. Waiting for the train we may go to buy a newspaper and, oh yes, feeling lucky—a lottery ticket, dispensed by any one of thousands of specialist devices. Walking from the destination station to work, we remember to visit the ATM and check that our employer has paid us for the last month before we put in another day of toil. The ATM is overlooked by a surveillance camera to protect us from the increasing number of thefts from such places; one of thousands of cameras spread across the city, hopefully making it safer, but at least easier to capture criminals in action. The employee arriving at work may be there to serve meals in the canteen or clean the windows and would not be considered an IT user, yet en route to work they have already encountered five separate IT networks, without even thinking about it.
This is just day-to-day stuff; there are many more examples. A visit to a health centre will mean a doctor calling up your records on a traditional PC network. If the news is bad you may be sent off to a specialist clinic for a scan. The specialist will access the same records as the doctor on a PC network and the scanner is likely to be linked in to the network as well, automatically associating the scan results with your overall health record.
On a darker note, should you be spotted up to no good by one of those surveillance cameras and end up on the wrong side of the law, you will pick up a criminal record that will follow you around on a conventional police PC network. If you escape a prison sentence, you may still be subject to a control order that will lead to you being monitored by a tag strapped to your leg—offenders connected to law enforcers by an invisible network.
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