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microtodd writes:
In the wake of Cisco's announcement of entering the cloud market, there are several business case analyses that provide insight into whether the cloud is a good thing or not. Of course there are always competing factors between management and IT, which usually boils down to short-term vs long-term cost and financials vs technicals. What do the Soylenters think? Is the cost savings worth the security risks? Are the technical benefits of reliability worth delegating some administrative control?
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Migration to Cloud? Just marketing buzz or useful?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:34AM
Disclaimer: I work for one of the largest IT companies in Europe. This view is my own and not of my employer.
I am sure there are specific cases for using the Cloud, but I don't know any of them. My company is pushing hard for cloud offerings, including working with the governments (which we already do).
For the marketing people it's all "the could can do this..., the cloud will let you do that...", but it's still a bunch of servers somewhere that need to be maintained by someone like me. Patches/upgrades, hardware faults, and all the usual stuff that needs to happen with servers - physical or virtual.
I see it as just moving the problem from one place to another, and paying a huge amount of money for the service.
The next issue we will soon see is what happens when you fall out with your provider.? Of your provider goes bust, gets taken over, or even just raises its prices just because it can.
Brian Madden has a write up about having an exit strategy for a DaaS provider. You should read it.e /2014/02/10/what-are-you-going-to-do-if-your-daas- provider-pulls-the-plug-you-need-an-exit-strategy. aspx [brianmadden.com]
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/gabeknuth/archiv
(Score: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:44PM
"Cloud" was taken over by marketing droids to mean a hosted service somewhere, be it a plain vm, or incorporating services too like email, or file hosting.
Originally it talked about building your own applications that scaled across data centres, and that you cold add more processing power on an hour by hour basis. If you need lots of processing power on the last day of the month, you court rent it for a few hours rather than keep lots of servers around. Personally I don't have much need for that type of application, but I can see those that do.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mvar on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:50PM
I wouldnt go so far regarding "what happens if..." scenarios, usually a service provider doesn't go bust next day. What i'd be more worried would be loss of connectivity to the provider due to some cable issue etc. Most companies that I've worked with that consider "moving to the cloud" haven't even thought of this simple case. For the average enterprise (medium to small), this risk plus the monthly cost for an FO & backup line doesnt justify (yet) the cost savings from moving to the "cloud"
(Score: 1) by aclarke on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:15PM
What do you have on the "not cloud" side?
- Hosted web applications already on someone else's hardare?
- Physical servers in your own data centre?
- Physical servers in someone else's data centre?
- Virtualized environment on physical servers, or just physical servers?
What do you mean by the cloud?
- PaaS
- straight-up hardware you rent by the hour, old-school AWS style?
- Something else that probably isn't the cloud but your marketing department thinks it is because you don't own it?
You probably know all this, but I want to put it down for other readers. If you are moving from your own physical, non-virtualized environment to the cloud, you have different systems management tasks, and you probably have fewer of them. You still have to answer the question of "what do I do if the network connection disappears", or "what happens if a server goes down", but your answers will be different. Often your answers with the cloud will be easier and/or cheaper.
With a PaaS model, you will also have less or no work regarding patches/upgrades or hardware faults. You will move your application onto their environment, and they will handle all that for you.