You have no control over critical items such as: Patches, expansions/plugins, upgrades. I know of more than a few enterprises that have opted out of solutions because providers were unable to provide them functionality that they would be able to provide themselves if they ran it in house.

Don’t get me wrong. I think cloud computing is definately going to be a viable solution and much more than ‘a fad.’ especially given the ability to provision servers on demand. the ability to expand your computing environment on the fly without costly hardware is HUGE. So is having someone take the maintenance off your hands for many people who would have issues patching systems on their own.

For resource constrained (space/cooling/sysadmin/others) It is a fantastic solution. For people with very specific needs, not as much.

once again good for probably %80 of the cases but not for all.

The day when utility computing is as reliable as the power and telephone utilities would be a massively great day for the practice. And yet even those well-known reliable entities are backstopped by generators and multiple redundancy, in a well-run IT shop, indicating that we (justifiably) don’t trust them completely.

b) I work for a company in a section that performs web hosting and we live by our SLAs. And, even the smaller hosting providers give you a SLA which guarantees uptime, availability, notice of outages, etc.

There are stiff financial penalties for outages covered by the SLA.

If not, I’m not prepared to trust your cloud with my mission-critical functionality. I’m going to build it myself. To you, a stiff penalty is one that wipes out the company’s fund for annual bonuses. To me, a stiff penalty is one that makes an unplanned outage inconceivable by putting as much of your skin in the game as I have of mine. I’ve never seen an SLA like that, and I’ve been in the internet services business since before 99% of the population had heard the word “internet”.

If you can’t get your email for a little while, you’re annoyed. If my IT services go down at the wrong time, I’m bankrupt.

VMworld had 15,000 registrants–which one has 25,000?

Who’s managing “your” servers? What is their arrest record? Do they lock their workstation when they get up for a smoke break? Any time you put your data into the hands of people you don’t know personally, you have lost control of who accesses your data, and other procedural security measures. There are ways to mitigate this risk (encryption, etc) but that doesn’t change the fact that you HAVE lost control of that aspect of operations.

Also, in reference to the above comment’s hypothetical convention registration failure, you *have* added additional points of failure. If my business works locally, I have my servers, my network to worry about. If the data and/or apps are distributed, I have my physical internet connection and my ISP to add to that list.

I think that rather than a blanket statement that cloud computing offers no loss of control, or is perfectly safe, it would be more useful to offer suggestions on how one can evaluate a cloud computing provider, and related services, for reliability and safety.

You don’t have 100% control over your website when it gets hacked and it takes forever to get them to fix it. Or when someone gets through the firewall and downloads all your sensitive data. The bigger the target, the more likely it is to be attacked.

Cloud computing is not a new idea. It is a return to an old one. And less secure than the old mainframes that were not connected to an increasingly insecure internet.

What will the admins do for a job in their current company?

That’s my rant over! Now to a more reasonable argument…

I currently have 100% control of my data; how could I possibly be “gaining more of it” ?

An couple of examples of losing control:
. Some government officials, domestic or overseas, want to examine my data for some reason. Currently I can say yes or no to this, depending on the circumstances, but if someone else physically has my data they may decide to give it up to whoever ‘officially’ asks for it, without my approval.
. If I don’t login to my free hotmail account for a month, my account and all my messages are deleted. I know I can pay a monthly fee to stop this happening, but then I’m paying for some control, not for the service.

These may not be the most robust examples that could be made, but my point is that there are many negative scenarios applicable to many different people. Sure, some people will be happy to migrate entirely to a cloud; many others may find it useful for certain activities; but many will have enough valid reasons that they will have no part in it.

Also, having your data stored remotely puts another possible point of failure between you and your work, i.e. your Internet connection. Failure of this would not be the responsibility of the cloud provider but if you are not able to access your data, who is ‘liable’ is largely academic.

Finally, a quick word to khess: The scenario put forward by lelnet was a cloud scenario. Not only did you misunderstand, you then went on to be both patronising & condescending, smileys notwithstanding. I, for one, would prefer it if such comments were kept to yourself.

“Anyone who uses a hosted web or mail service knows that you have 100% control over the content without the worry of where it is and whether or not the service is available.”

This statement is just… wrong. Anyone with any sysadmin experience could provide a long and sorry list of where the SLA’s, Control Panels, and Admin tools just didn’t even apply, let alone fix the problem. The list of security lapses by various companies ‘in the cloud’ is long and well-documented. Internet connection quality across the US is not even close to good enough to justify this kind of strategy. There is only a marginal equivalence between web hosting and mail (where communication over the internet is inherently necessary), and moving a company’s essential applications and data to the control of a third party. The practical differences between these two situations deserves an entire article, not just a forum response.

So, yes, *if* a myriad of technical details someday work out just the way the author is apparently envisioning, and *if* humans suddenly get some universal urge to always do ‘the right thing’, and *if* legal agreements suddenly start to coincide with what really happens in real-life business, and *if* web application user interfaces start to get even *anywhere close* to apps running locally – I’ll be right there with him ‘in the cloud’.

Until then, no thanks.

Stuart Quimby.

Unca Xitron.

Unca Xitron

By “gaining more control”, I mean that service providers give you access by standard methods (terminal services, SSH, SFTP, etc.) and you get usage statistics, etc. as well.

For most people who will use CC in the near term, they will use it for hosted applications and it won’t make a difference if your ISP or you have a problem getting to the Internet or not. Your applications will be available to the world at large to use regardless of your status.

As I said in the article, there is resistance–namely based on security but other reasons as well. No, CC is not new but Mainframes are a good example of the future and its past. My article post for next week is on that very subject–having to do with Mainframes as the next major virtualization platform. MFs are also viable for CC.

The bottom line is this: CC is a soon to be fact of life whether or not you use it for your own business, you will use it for other things and won’t even know it–hence the title of this piece.

There are people working on this certification right now. If you email me personally, I can point you to them.

Unca Xitron

One issue NOT addresses is court-access. When your media files are all happily on your various terrabyte hard drives at home, you pay nothing to watch the movie you converted from a purchased DVD to a scratch-proof, loss-proof digital image. Moreover, you pay no data download charges to view it. (Only the US has truly unlimited downloads, and that pricing formula is close to broken.)

But put your files on someone else’s hosted service and now any court (even in another country) could order a search or history-search of what you had stored. When it is in your own premises, it is much harder for others to gain such access, and you always retain the right to delete.

IMHO, these issues will remain impediments… So, just like some people are well suited to web-based email solutions, some will love the solace from cloud computing. But some will prefer the greater control. And with the cost of storage about to drop below US$100/TB, the cost to store your own data will not be significant. It will come down to trust.