Dev.SN

Migration to Cloud? Just marketing buzz or useful?

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:23AM   
from the SoylentCloud-SoylentBI dept.

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?

• Security / Latency / Cost Security / Latency / Cost (Score: 2) by elf on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:50AM

  by elf (64) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:50AM (#21012)

  It all comes down to security / latency and cost.

  Is it more cost effective to have a cloud provider host your data?
  Do you need to read this data in a performant way and do you need to read it often?
  Do you care about the many articles of people being hacked and the chance that you could be next because your provider had a lot of peoples data all in one place. And I guess do you rate your provider secure

  To me cloud computing is a buzz word, I think cloud is good for portability (where you want to access the same data from many devices) but apart from this I don't see it as something that will catch on in the larger companies. Cost will make it beneficial for small companies but as a company grows the other conciderations take over.

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• Re:Security / Latency / Cost (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:42PM

  by VLM (445) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:42PM (#21043)

  "the chance that you could be next"

  In public, all employees of all companies are rockstars at the peak of ability.

  Reality is of course more depressing in that 50% are below the median.

  The managerial advantage of security issues on the cloud is that if you flip a coin and/or actually figure out you're below median, then its safer for your career to jump off the bridge with everyone else in the cloud than to have questions asked, like how a company staffed entirely by top 5% of skill rockstars none the less hired below the median resulting in a security breach.

  This will eventually be figured out by the market, where security fools will tend to congregate into cloud services and a selling point will be local hosting of security related stuff rather than cloud hosting of security related services.

  Obviously a major competitor, speaking as a guy who worked at cloudy SAAS type places for most of my history, a customer's uptime and data is not worth a penny more than the cost of sales to acquire a replacement customer and/or some kind of NPV of the revenue the customer represents. And thats not very much, I assure you. On the other hand, if you think of a locally hosted mail server, suddenly the CEO can demand the head of everyone in IT, from CFO on down, if its not fixed, at least in theory.

  This also applies to things like scalability and uptime and all that, not just security. Cloud will eventually equal incompetence in the eyes of the general public, at which point it'll mostly go away, at least as a fad.

  Parent