Comments on: Dear Mr Ballmer, this won’t happen at your datacenter because…?

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:25:00 +0000

You’re thinking of Application Service providers, Alan. That’s V.07 or so of Cloud Computing, in as much as it wasn’t about moving your job to a place with some cheap MIPS, it was just about not having it inside your operation. ASP has found it’s niche, t seems, in ISP’s offering Managed Exchange Servers – an offer which so far seems to founder rather rapidly on the service record of the ISP, whenever I investigate it in my clients!

By: Alan Lewis

Alan Lewis — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:28:18 +0000

Steve – we had this discussion back in 1997/98.. then its was network delivered applications (cannot recall the ‘buzz term’ then). Everyone gaga at the thought of running word/hyperion/sap from a server running at Sema, Gap Gemini, HP, etc. No one highlighted any pitfalls except the tech managers like me who pointed out that 2mb megastream links were expensive, and insufficient when you had upwards of 50, let alone1500 users… and what happened when the WAN, or the local exchange caught fire

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:20:09 +0000

ah but if only the people adopting the cloud model stuck tightly to your sector view, David! Fact is, sadly, they don’t. If you’re a small operation with a small groupware server hosted by a virtual services ISP, who are busted because smething else they do is illegal (or they don;t pay taxes), what are you gonna do next?

By: David Wright

David Wright — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:20:57 +0000

Storage, per se, isn’t the problem with Cloud Computing, more the applications uses to access the data and the scalability of those applications.

If you host a website through a cloud, if you have a sale and your hit rate goes from 200,000 hits a day to 250,000 hits an hour, you might need to lay on extra capacity, quickly. The amount of stored data is probably relatively small, but the amount of simultaneous accesses to that data is one of the reasons why cloud computing is attractive.

Also, if one cluster goes down, theoretically, another cluster somewhere “in the cloud” takes over. That is cheaper, on paper, than having a replicated data centre at another location.

The problem is the jurisdiction that covers the servers, as you rightly say. That could make for some very high “unforeseen” costs

By: John Hind

John Hind — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:44:52 +0000

I remain astonished by the continued enthusiasm for off-shore data hosting. Many companies offering such services do not even state which countries they use for their data centres. By using such services you are exposing yourself to legal jeopardy in an often unknown jurisdiction and likely one you are not currently exposed to. It is particularly worrying that data is often held in the US, exposing you to an environment with very high legal costs, a complex overlapping system of local, state and federal laws and jurisdictions, rampant abuse of legal process by corporate entities and a legal system which shows scant respect for the human rights of non-US individuals or organisations.

These risks are compounded by the fact that your operations will be co-hosted with many other companies of unknown reliability. As in this case your activities and the integrity of your data may be compromised by possibly dodgy activities completely outside your control.

Given the ridiculously low cost of data storage hardware, are these process risks really worth running? It is hard enough to manage conformance and legal risks in the territories in which you seek to earn your profits without unnecessarily exposing your company to additional territories.

Far too much of the corporate world seems to think that simply by assuming globalisation it will become a fact. When you run into the law and politics you quickly come back down to base reality!

By: David Wright

David Wright — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:11:40 +0000

I’ve been saying that cloud based hosting is bad for companies for this sort of reason, plus who owns the data, since it first appeared – even before, when Google Docs first appeared.

I can see the use of clouds for large companies, where they can spread the cloud among their satellite sites and internally hosted “Web” applications (an intranet version of Google Docs, for example), but shifting your company confidential data out into the cloud, without making sure you know where it is located and not having redundency still seems foolhardy to me.

For most sites I worked on, there were contingency plans to have a mobile data centre roll up and take over where the last offsite back-ups left off (i.e. max 8 hours loss of work) after “an aircraft hit the office” (actual scenario for a 1998 test of the disaster recovery plan!).

If your cloud is “siezed” and taken off-line, where do you start your disaster recovery from? Redundancy in the cloud is all well and good, but if all of the offices are hit simultaneously, you are still back at square one…