Scott Alan Miller on the Brave New LANless Future | MangoCon 2016

Interesting; most of us who have been in the field (LAN admins, low on cloud exposure) for a while likely gotten a sense of this coming in one way or another, but this is the first time I have heard it so specifically referred to in this (much) larger context of the entire LAN itself and not just individual applications. My own sense about it has evolved through what I see going on with cloud services, and my own questions of how these separate cloud services would intercommunicate (and authenticate) in a secure manner. As I have learned more about them and as my company continues to move towards cloud applications, under the hood I have seen exactly the sort of mechanisms that Scott describes. Unfortunately, I also see this maneuvering by application vendors (and highly sold by MSPs) not solely as a security enhancement, but (mainly) as a way to effectively destroy local competition (IT managing local systems) and drive cloud adoption... and thus gaining that regular monthly subscription fee that they all desire. I think this posturing by the vendors is perhaps 20% security/forward thinking and 80% a profit-driven money grab. I think the real answer is something more in the middle. I don't think LAN-less can yet even be a "thing", or ever can be completely so. I think it is sort of like a logarithmic function... in that the function always moves closer to a certain value but never achieves it. Nor would we want it to. The benefits that networking allows are, yes, the obvious standardization, but also general purpose computing. The more options or toolsets that are removed from both admins/power users and end users alike, the less control they have over their own digital destiny. When every single application is as complicated as he mentions (security layers, specific APIs), it is highly doubtful that outrageous subscription fees can EVER be avoided, for any software product ever again. And that, my friends, only serves to expand the digital divide. Those who can afford all of those expensive services... and those who simply cannot.

wow! awesome talk!