“Any sufficiently popular, or important, computer technology will be mercilessly mocked 20 years later.” 

I call that Lunduke’s Theory of Computer Mockery. (Yes, I named it after myself. Because… why not?)

The more important the technology, the more ruthlessly and brutally it will be mocked. It helps if the technology was, itself, a bit flawed when new. But even when a piece of tech is well received initially, 20 years later it will be fully brutalized. 

Let’s take a look at some examples: 

Windows 95 

Would you use Windows 95 in 2017? Of course not. Would you make fun of it without regard for its feelings? Of course you would. 

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I've worked at my fair share of large corporations in my life, and like most of you, I've experienced more network and server outages than I can shake a stick at. Sometimes these outages are small and only mildly disruptive (a file server going down for a few minutes). Other times, an outage can cause massive, widespread work stoppages (such as when an email server goes offline for multiple hours — or days). 

These outages are, at least for the company, bad things. If your employees can no longer communicate, work all but grinds to a halt. One hour of total downtime multiplied by the average hourly pay of your employees can equal a pretty big amount of lost moolah.

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If you're reading this, you have internet access.

You probably have it either through a local cable or fibre ISP or through your cell phone provider. We all have one (usually both) of these.

Speedy. Reliable (mostly). Boring.

What happens when that infrastructure goes down? Maybe the power goes out somewhere along the network. Maybe a cell tower gets attacked by Godzilla. Who knows? Dangers lurk around every corner. 

+ Also on Network World: When disasters strike, edge computing must kick in +

In those cases, when your traditional network connection fails you, you're going to need a backup. Something to get you back up, online and moving data around. And, what the heck, we might as well do it all with as much flair and pizzazz as possible.

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Nextcloud today released a preview of Nextcloud 13, its online file storage solution for enterprise and individual users.

What makes this release so interesting? End-to-end file encryption.

When we’re talking about the needs of big businesses, keeping files secure is absolutely critical. There has been no shortage of data breaches and hacks in recent months – reliable encryption and security is absolutely vital to reducing those problems. 

+ Also on Network World: 4 ways to simplify data management +

From Jos Poortvliet, member of the Nextcloud, team:

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Recently I made the (unfortunate) decision to eat at a particular fast-food establishment. For the sake of this story, let’s call it Shmurger Shming.

I didn’t eat at The Shming because the food tastes amazing. Nor did I choose to ingest those Shmurgers because I thought it was, in any way, healthy for me. In fact, I knew full well that eating them would cause not insignificant amounts of gastronomical distress.

Which begs the question: Why, on this green Earth, would I make that decision? Why would I do that to myself?

Simple. It was convenient, there was very little up-front investment (in time and money), and it was food. Technically. In other words, I was lazy.

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Hypothetical: You need to set up the IT infrastructure (email, file sharing, etc.) for a new company. No restrictions. No legacy application support necessary. How would you do it? What would that ideal IT infrastructure look like?

I decided to sit down and think of my ideal setup — based on quite a few years of being a vice president of engineering at various companies — and document them here. Maybe you’ll find my choices useful; maybe you’ll think I’m crazy. Either way, these are good things to consider for any organization. 

Run services on your own servers 

The first thing I’m going to decide on, right up front, is to self-host as many services as I possibly can. 

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Any organization that creates and promotes industry standards should operate in an open and transparent way. Any lack of visibility will cause tremendous doubt and concerns around those standards. 

Case in point: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 

A few weeks back, I wrote about one of their most recent standards—Electronic Media Extensions (EME)—which sought to create a standard framework for Digital Right Management (DRM) on the web. When the W3C officially approved this standard, it generated massive backlash from every corner of the technology world. 

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A few weeks back, I wrote that “choosing Microsoft Windows for your organization should get you fired.”

It’s a statement that, while certainly a bit on the inflammatory side, I completely stand by—mostly due to the known insecure nature of running Windows as a server operating system.

What I didn’t do was give specific examples of what to move your existing Windows-based infrastructure to. Sure, the obvious answer for most SysAdmins is simply “migrate the servers over to Linux.” But what about specific server applications that your organization might already rely upon? That’s a whole other can of worms.

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