Working offline with cloud services - what are the options?

Awareness of the cloud as a compelling model for the consumption of IT functionality by businesses is growing.  The benefits are increasingly well understood and the seismic shift from DIY IT to IT as a service from the cloud is already underway.  Nevertheless, there is gap in the model that cloud service providers and vendors often like to gloss over: ‘What happens when I don’t have an Internet connection?’ 

Perhaps the most common response from the cloud sales person is ‘…well people can get an Internet connection almost anywhere now via the mobile telephone network…’ 

However, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon.  There are a whole host of scenarios where users just can’t get a connection of any sort, let alone one that’s fat enough to make the use of the more bandwidth-hungry VDI-type cloud services viable.  Many companies who want to take advantage of the cloud model operate internationally – the cloud expressly enables that – and Internet infrastructures vary considerably across countries.  Equally, there are a surprisingly high number of difficult use case scenarios that need to be catered for.  For example, we have been asked to deliver cloud-based business applications to remote users operating in locations like an oil rig in the Niger Delta, a ship crossing the Indian Ocean and a team operating in Cairo during the recent civil unrest when the authorities switched off Internet access for the entire country.  In all of these examples, our users required the ability to work seamlessly, flexibly and securely offline.

So what are the options and what are the pros and cons?

Locally Installed Applications
The 'old faithful' reversionary option is to install applications locally on a laptop.  This approach has the advantage of providing applications in a way that is familiar to the overwhelming majority of users and is probably the cheapest method of equipping users to work offline.  However, there are drawbacks: the locally-installed applications have to be supported across a fleet of laptops; data has to be downloaded to be locally manipulated, which 'fragments' corporate data across multiple devices and renders it vulnerable to loss or, even more likely, theft.  Of course, hard disk encryption of all corporate laptops is an option to protect locally-held data but it’s very expensive.  This is arguably the least desirable approach to enabling users to work with important corporate file data outside the cloud platform or corporate network.

Applications on a ‘stick’
Another option is to provide applications on a USB memory stick.  This approach provides a very convenient and flexible offline working capability using ‘localised’ applications on a range of host devices, although it requires the additional expense of virtualisation software to do it.  At present, this approach can be problematic for a number of reasons.  One fundamental problem is that most virtualisation software creates a self-contained ‘sandbox’ environment within which the applications run.  To provide the applications to the user, the whole sandbox image has to be copied to the memory stick, which also means generally it can be copied off the memory stick,  effectively enabling the software applications to be 'pirated' to an unlimited extent by an unscrupulous user.  Like the use of locally-installed applications, this approach also fragments data over multiple USB sticks which are often insecure; if a stick gets lost so does the data and corporate applications that can be readily pirated.