Cloud Computing And Your Business – Dangerous Dependencies

 

Cloud Computing And Your Business – Dangerous Dependencies

Small business owners, virtual organizations, entrepreneurs on the go, and other prospective clients of some of the large companies which are promising to provide software as a service, in the form of a cloud link. This article is pointed (like a revolver), at every entrepreneur, business leader, decision maker, IT professional, CIO, CTO and responsible individual who will be involved in choosing whether or not to keep data centers and software “in house,” or to merely hook up to THE CLOUD (sounds scary, doesn’t it?).

This article is being published in both THE GLOBAL FUTURIST and in REASON OUT OF RANDOMNESS (now showing at https://douglascastle1.wordpress.com) , two of the blogs for which I write. My assessment is that there will be some serious hesitation on the part of security- and reliability-conscious firms (probably larger ones) to jump to cloud solutions as more frightening “incidents” happen; yet despite this, I believe that the seeming ease and spurious economics of merely hooking up to the cloud will eventually dominate the marketplace. I would estimate a three- to five-year timeframe before most of the computerized world has decided (or has been coerced) to hook into the collective brain instead of growing their own neurons. 

The plus side is wonderful – software is shared, costs are greatly reduced per user (for the time being), information can be interlinked and communicated in certain cloud-networked groups, a limitless number of applications can be shared, “dumber devices” (i.e., communications devices, mobile phones, pads, tablets and other goodies without any burdensome software to download into them and to update constantly) can be smallerized and made more cheaply — by primordial analogy, you don’t need a phonograph and a record collection when you can just turn on your itsy-bitsy radio.

The minus side is horrific – each cloud provider will be a large company with a large number of customers increasingly dependent upon it to service their needs. These companies become territorial, monopolistic utilities. Do you love your cable services provider? The telephone company? The electric company? The water company? Your “too big to fail” bank? Most of us don’t like dealing with or depending upon utilities providers — we are less their customers and more their victims. The bigger they become, the worse the service is. The richer they get, the more that legislation seems to favor them; like a governmental genie granting them limitless wishes.

The trend is definitely toward cloud computing. But think of the security issues, the vulnerability issues, the quality control issues. I am going to install and download my own software for as long as I am able to do so. But, once again, that may only be 36 to 60 months. After all, big companies like Amazon do not simply want more consumers — they want more consumer access and control. 

The article link below appeared in a recent ZDNet Newsletter. It speaks of lessons to be learned from Amazon’s catastrophic failure as a “Cloud Provider”. Yes, some wonderful lessons are born of tragedies, but sometimes it is best to avoid the tragedies if you can see them on the horizon…

Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage

After a harrowing four days, the remaining few customers still affected by Amazon’s major outage are gradually coming back online. Here are seven key lessons to learn from this episode.READ FULL STORY

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle