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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: 4, Informative) by aclarke on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:59PM
Just yesterday I completed a major migration from physical servers to the cloud. There were quite a few reasons for this. The company is small and they don't have in-house networking experts. That's not their focus, so why should they divert attention from their main products to handle issues on which they're not experts anyway? On that vein, the servers were running operating systems which were no longer even supported. The servers were in a different country than the development team, which made physical access prohibitively difficult. There was no backup system in place if any of the existing hardware failed or there was any other problem of that sort. Plus, it's hard to tell how much now, but costs are going to be reduced significantly. One estimate was up to 75% in cost reduction; I don't think it's going to be anything that dramatic, but it's going to be noticeable.
One question was about security. In my opinion, the new system is more secure than the old one. Patching servers will be much much easier, as patching the old servers were actually impossible due to a number of issues. Since at least part of the system is on a PaaS model, we don't even have to worry about patching there. Plus, since nobody on the team is dedicated to managing this sort of thing, we are basically in a sense hiring the cloud provider to help look after some of this. Changing systems has introduced new security risks, but overall I believe the product is much more secure than it was.
I generally would say I'm a proponent of starting on the cloud, and then possibly moving to one's own hardware. In this case, the move went in the opposite direction and I'm very confident it was the right move. Many people think "cloud" == "hardware you don't own" and that's it. That's part of the answer, but the answer also includes the ability to scale resources up and down as needed. This just isn't possible with physical hardware, at least not in the sense that I can pay US$0.17 for an hour of server time when I need it.