Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Fri Nov 2 12:47:04 CDT 2012
There is still some bugs to be worked out in the Cloud environment as the systems are still in its infancy but every day they become more stable. The beauty of the Cloud is that regardless what component goes down the data is synchronized everywhere. That said, the IT guys job is still secure as data configuration, data security and backup is still required. Here is a good over-sight of the Cloud's IT services needed. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/will-the-cloud-be-the-end-of-the -it-department/5825?tag=nl.e101&s_cid=e101 A business can not run period if their communications goes down unless they depend on foot-traffic. Even some of the largest grocery store chains, when they loss communications just buffer their data until they are re-connected with head office systems. (I worked on a number of these chains and also know how they were setup.) I think the Cloud is not a new invention but an expansion of what already existed and it is just being extended to everyone. Right now it is having growing pains but in another five years, all issues will be forgotten and it will be the standard. The big plus is that databases of unlimited size and maximum performance can be created and any small company can expand rapidly without any major investment is hardware or hardware support...it is like you are now using your own Google distributive database system. It has John Colby written all over it. ;-) Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby Sent: Friday, November 02, 2012 9:53 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [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. > > > -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com