Them newfangled whosawhatsits dun't change anything.
I can’t and won’t try to speak for other companies in this. How you measure change is a pretty big part of the question; this is different to each company and indeed to each individual. I can provide some anecdotal evidence based entirely upon my personally experiences with the companies (and indeed mid-sized home networks) that I manage.
In my experience the only “change” to have occurred anywhere in the SME or home network landscapes over the past tenish years have been virtualization and utility computing.
If I go back to the turn of the century most companies were running dedicated servers for everything little task and just about everyone was hosting their own e-mail servers. Here, as we venture out of the aughties and into the (what the heck to you call the “tens” of a century, anyways?) absolutely everything I see running is virtualized. Most individuals have “cloud/utility/hosted” e-mail services, (typically g-mail,) and every smaller business I know of has gone this way too. (Against my recommendations, I might add.) In addition to this, calendars/scheduling seems to have moved into “the cloud” once more in the form of Google. (I know of only two SMEs that haven’t moved “everything outlook does” over to Google’s abomination.) Everything else seems to run locally; usually several on one physical server with multiple VMs; each VM essentially a container for a given hosted app. (One for the point of sales software, one for the DC, one [industry specific chunk of software] etc.)
But has this really changed how IT is done? In my opinion it most certainly has not. E-mail/calendaring was moved into “the cloud” by smaller businesses and individuals because it was a hassle to have locally. Still, even ten years ago those folks running their own e-mail servers had web-mail available to them on those servers. The folks (like me) running their own e-mail/calendaring software currently have web-mail. The only difference is who maintains the server. (Oh, and privacy, liability and legal implications, natch.) In my personal case, I am too lazy to set up webmail; I have a virtual machine sitting on my home server that runs a copy of Windows XP. It has my personal copy of outlook, my instant messengers, IRC client and the paranoid-configured version of firefox on it. I simply RDP into it from anywhere I happen to be and can check my various mails/messengers/channels as well as read whatever articles of El Reg or Ars happen to be populating the eleventeen squillion open tabs in firefox. The only difference between this and how I was working ten years ago was that ten years ago it was a copy of server 2000 I was RDPing into, and that was on a physical system.
Virtualization has allowed us to run “more stuff’ in a smaller cooling and electrical footprint, but the same old “one server to one application” ideology persists. The only difference is that this “one server” happens to now be virtual instead of physical. The “eggs in one basket” scenario has forced SMEs to start thinking a bit about redundancy; that “one virtual server” typically has a cold spare somewhere in case the first system dies. (Yard the array out of server 1, plug it into the hot-swap bays of server 2, and fire her up.) This could be counted as change; most SMEs 10 years ago were just figuring out that RAID thing. Now at least when a server decides to implode they are usually reasonably prepared.
I guess the conclusion of this long meandering is no; at least in my experience, IT isn’t being done “differently.” There is no real change, except in the tools available. The underlying assumptions made by most practitioners and user of IT remain the same. Business priorities remain constant; no one worries about things like security, liability or redundancy until it bites them in the proverbial. All these newfangled gizmos and whosawhatsits haven’t really changed the fundamental reality of computers; they are merely tools. They are implemented where there is a business case, and any change, update, security or alteration in ease-of-use is resisted with a stubbornness that borders on an elemental force.
Same as it has been, same as it ever will be.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
