[AccessD] The downside of Cloud Computing

There are several issues with "cloud" computing.  The physical communication infrastructure 
(connection to the internet) is one and if the access goes down the access goes down.  If you are 
doing things between two or more physical locations then you are up the crick so to speak.

A lot of small business however just have a single location so DIS (for example) can limp along if 
their internet is down precisely because they host their data internal to their location.  No 
internet required to get at the data.

Another issue is if the data itself is in "the cloud" then there is the issue of the cloud servers 
going down.  Again if you host your own cloud internal to your facilities then you have more control.

There are pluses to operating "in the cloud" including robustness, expandability, third party 
backups.  OTOH we have seen many times in the last year where huge swaths of the internet went down 
because those swatchs were in a clout (data center) which croaked for some reason.  It happened to 
Microsoft's cloud as well as Amazon's cloud.

I think we are truly in the infancy of this paradigm and in a decade it will be really rock solid, 
but it certainly isn't today.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 11/2/2012 10:52 AM, Mark Simms wrote:
> I'm contracted at a profitable small business in Delaware.
> The company I contracted thru developed a really slick web app that bridges
> communications of inventory between the company's remote warehouse and their
> administrative office.
> They have become completely dependent upon it.
>
> This past week, they were totally operating blind because their Comcast
> business network was adversely affected by the Sandy storm. Because Comcast
> had monopoly control over their area (Verizon FIOS was not servicing that
> area due to low population density), they could not get Comcast's attention
> to resolve their connectivity issues.
>
> They lost business as a result of this situation....and there was absolutely
> nothing that could be done about it.
>
>
>