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Age of wise foolishness?

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:43

Jon Honeyball discusses the good, the bad and the outright ugly from the recent mix09 conference.

Can someone explain to me why moving to a Cloud-based Exchange Server is going to be any more reliable than a properly managed, supported and updated server held by a rack-space provider in the UK? There's too much wishful thinking going on in this area and not nearly enough hard risk assessment. I'm not attacking Microsoft alone on this issue, although its new hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Navision platforms are the topic de jour. Other companies will be just as bad, or worse, and I implore you to think through issues about system recovery, liability, SLA and so forth before you sign on the dotted line.

It's one thing to use a free Hotmail or Gmail account, where you pay nothing and expect nothing back. Or a website that hosts your shared photos such as Flickr or videos at YouTube. You pay nothing and you get no SLA. But running a business solution is a different matter. You can understand why corporations such as Microsoft would wish to have no meaningful SLA in place - they're run by lawyers and accountants, and if they can pass all their liability back to you and get away with it then that's the most cost-efficient solution. In this new marketplace being second, third or even 23rd in the list of adopters will be a wise delay.

As things stand, I can't see how anyone outside of the US could sign up to such systems, and a complete rethink of pricing, SLAs and liabilities need to be in place before you should even begin to consider it. That goes for hosted Exchange Server just as much as for the first release of Azure. I'm sorry, I'd love to be more positive, but no-one inside Microsoft has been able to assuage my anxieties so far.

There's one nightmare scenario that I will share with you. I sincerely hope this doesn't come to pass, but it might. A prime market for these hosted Exchange/SharePoint/Navision solutions in the UK will, of course, be local councils, which can sign up to a fixed-cost IT service and hence prune their IT headcounts. It's all very easy until something goes bang and all their data goes offline for a week. Or worse, until someone spots that the council's data is now being hosted in Oregon or Singapore. Then data protection lawsuits will fly like feathers when the fox gets into the chicken coop, and the councillors will protest "but they were such nice people to do business with!"

It's good that I'm not feeling really paranoid, because if I were I might conclude that Microsoft doesn't give a damn about this extra-territoriality stuff, and will offer a service that you can take or leave, because there's no money in it once you consider hosting costs. That's because it has to come up with something to appease shareholders nervous over the huge cost of recent datacenter rollouts, and merely breaking-even might achieve that. Hope you're feeling lucky, because "I'm not bovvered" would take on a whole new meaning in this context.