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Posted on July 14th, 2009 by Jon Honeyball
Microsoft needs to get real when it comes to hosting
So the reports are that Microsoft believes there is a huge untapped demand for internet-hosted cloud-based services like Exchange Server, SharePoint and so forth.
One report, from our friends at The Register, states: “Nine out of 10 will also want to deploy the web-based versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Office 2010 – due in the first half of next year. Stephen Elop (Microsoft’s business applications chief) didn’t reveal the source of the data behind his claim, but the message was blunt.”
I think not. In fact, I will eat my hat if it gets 90% business uptake of hosted services. The reliance on unreliable internet connectivity is scary beyond belief, and although I am certain that Microsoft itself will have huge deployments of this stuff, it forgets that its cloud services are effectively local storage to their network infrastructure. It’s a very different matter when your business is sitting in a village outside Newcastle.
And, to bang the drum once again, the SLA and contractual documentation is still a frightening mess. At least Dick Turpin had the good grace to wear a mask.
3 Responses to “ Microsoft needs to get real when it comes to hosting ”
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July 16th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Well said, Jon. As a small-business director, there’s absolutely no way I would commit my entire IT resource to a cloud service of this kind. Such services (whether provided by Microsoft, Google, Zoho, ThinkFree or anybody else) are only useful as adjuncts to a solid core of in-house resources – yes, I occasionally use an external account to work on documents and share them with colleagues, and I have a number of online (”cloud”) accounts which I use selectively, based on their specific strengths and weaknesses. But much of my own research time is spent working on ways to bring such conveniences in-house rather than find the perfect outsourcing partner. Such a partner doesn’t exist – precisely because outsourcing is not a perfect (or even close to perfect) solution. Interestingly, ThinkFree were talking about providing their cloud-based Office service (no, I don’t mean their application-sharing service, I mean their complete file-sharing, file preview and online search service) to clients as a downloadable solution, but that appears to have gone by the board. No doubt they have been seduced by all this SaaS “cloud” guff. I would be delighted to run my own “cloud”, certainly! But there’s a way to go yet. And (pace your good self) I wouldn’t dream of tying myself to Microsoft’s apron strings in order to do so.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:40 am
It seems to me that the cloud offers some benefits, data back up being the most significant. How many people reading this know their business data is poorly secured and would love to have all that done for them?
The reasoning for Microsoft’s utterances will, no doubt, be with an eye to some future point where we will remain dependent on their revenue generating software. I’m damned though if I’m going to be driven this way when 95% of my I.T. needs are satisfied by bog-standard products, used properly, i.e. with proper data back up and passwording. Good practice is that’s really needed.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:43 pm
[...] as Jon Honeyball points out in his post, Microsoft needs to get real when it comes to hosting, there are still huge hurdles to overcome. Will businesses really be able to trust cloud-based [...]