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S'trewth!
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CIOs Have Stopped Fighting the Cloud
- Thread starter Zarathustra[H]
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S'trewth!
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Most of the idiots running these companies are like "I can get rid of all my expensive IT people and save money".
Then their network connection goes down, or their cloud provider suffers an outage...
"But I'm all important! I need my data NOW! What do you mean none of the backup images work?"
Or you get bitchy clients who don't see to understand remote operation and want "the cloud" to all reside on their laptop...locally.
"I logged into my remote session. How do I copy all my files over? What? Days you say? It's only 500GB of data!"
And we've TRIED explaining things to these people. In excruciating detail.
They still think we're talking out our ass until they try it for themselves and come running back to on-premises.
Then their network connection goes down, or their cloud provider suffers an outage...
"But I'm all important! I need my data NOW! What do you mean none of the backup images work?"
Or you get bitchy clients who don't see to understand remote operation and want "the cloud" to all reside on their laptop...locally.
"I logged into my remote session. How do I copy all my files over? What? Days you say? It's only 500GB of data!"
And we've TRIED explaining things to these people. In excruciating detail.
They still think we're talking out our ass until they try it for themselves and come running back to on-premises.
Shintai
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You fail to mention you can mention even more cases where the on premise fails.
I hope those companies knows how to encrypt their data, because it only takes 1 password leak for all those trade/dirty little secrets to come out of the public.
The company I work for at least appreciates encryption, and AFAIK they have not even remotely considered cloud as backup because of trade secret considerations.
And one of the ITs puts it, if you can't see where the data is being store, you can't know what is happening to the data.
The company I work for at least appreciates encryption, and AFAIK they have not even remotely considered cloud as backup because of trade secret considerations.
And one of the ITs puts it, if you can't see where the data is being store, you can't know what is happening to the data.
Shintai
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Social engineering is the easiest way of getting peoples data. Encryption doesn't help there.
No, but cloud storage of sensitive information isn't doing anyone favors either.
Completely NOT cost effective for us.
We are a Microsoft developer, and they give us enough production licenses to run the business.
Saves us 10's of thousands in software costs, and is why we are almost completely a Microsoft shop.
Besides, we are constantly copying 60GB VM's (demos) across the network, something that is slow enough over a switched local GB connection. Even a 1GB internet connection would be too slow since it's shared.
Besides, the 60TB of data I support would be expensive to host, and trying to back it up to the Cloud would take over a week with a 1Gb connection
Costs money in azure to copy data as well.
It all depends on the business. Web hosting? Sure. Not like having your servers in a cage at a data center makes them so much more accessible. Storefront? Again, sure.
As many have mentioned, at any point where your data transfer to the Cloud is going to reach that magical 80% of any of your connections (Primary/Secondary/Tertiary) you have an issue.
And of course the issue of security is well beaten equine corpse.
As many have mentioned, at any point where your data transfer to the Cloud is going to reach that magical 80% of any of your connections (Primary/Secondary/Tertiary) you have an issue.
And of course the issue of security is well beaten equine corpse.
M76
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I still don't and probably never will understand what's the appeal of the cloud.
Storing your active files on a cloud is baffling to me. It doesn't matter that it is the 21st century, internet outages and service crippling ddos attacks are commonplace. Storing your files needed for day to day business on a cloud is just well playing with fire.
Putting two layers of uncertainty between yourself and your data is crazy. You're not just at the mercy of your internet provider but also the cloud provider when you need access.
The only use I can think for it is as a lazy way of implementing off-site backup for non-confidential non-critical data.
Storing your active files on a cloud is baffling to me. It doesn't matter that it is the 21st century, internet outages and service crippling ddos attacks are commonplace. Storing your files needed for day to day business on a cloud is just well playing with fire.
Putting two layers of uncertainty between yourself and your data is crazy. You're not just at the mercy of your internet provider but also the cloud provider when you need access.
The only use I can think for it is as a lazy way of implementing off-site backup for non-confidential non-critical data.
Shintai
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Its about moving what is often a semi professional setup at best into the professional category with much higher availability for services besides the cost part. I dont think people really understand how expensive and complex it is to run a proper service and the flexibility that's required today. And workers are getting more and more disconnected anyway from the corporate network. Mails on phones, working remote one way or the other. The concept of people having to sit every day in an office is eroding fast.
M76
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professional or semi professional is meaningless when you can do nothing but sit around and wait for someone else to do something. Because that's what happens when you outsource IT. If something goes wrong, you can't start fixing the problem right away.
VPN was available for a long time. It's not like only now can you access your data remotely thanks to the cloud. How safe is your data really on the cloud? What are the chances that someone attacks a large cloud provider? And what are the chances that someone attacks an individual small business?
That's kind of irrelevant. You don't want to run a proper cloud service you just want your data safe and readily available.
No matter how I look at it cloud seems to be an unnecessary overkill unless you run a web service that is accessed by at least tens of thousands of clients. Because creating a service that is stable under high load is really expensive and complex. But most businesses don't need that kind of service.
Shintai
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Its often not outsourced at all. Its simply a question about server location and service location.
Its not just VPN, its also Outlook Anywhere and so forth. The dangers for a small business is much greater because they dont have neither the manpower, the monitoring or the expertise.
Its certainly nor irrelevant and I can guarantee you businesses need this. The days of some amateurish setup because it was the limit of some random IT person is over.
The cloud offers the best of everything: Cost, availability and flexibility.
cageymaru
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Zarathustra[H] Cloud Computing won today. The Classic Empire came in second just like in this article.
LightsOut41
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I would strongly disagree with this. In fact, I was at Microsoft back in Feb for a Cloud Strategy meeting. They detailed the following fact and I was surprised at their candor:
62% of companies that established a cloud presence 3-5 years ago have pulled completely out of the Cloud due to cost.
I guess your meaning of the best is different than mine.
For most people, moving to the could cost more, for me the cost would many times more.
Availability? That's questionable. Most my equipment is just standard business grade, yet it's rare to have any down time, and when we have, it's been software related, and would likely have happened even if we where running in the cloud.
Flexibility? I prefer the flexibility of my locally managed equipment. Almost everything has been virtualized which makes it easy for me to move virtual servers around an load balance as needed.
It really depends on how you are planning on saving money. If you think you are going to be able to fire people, you are probably wrong, at least if you are running lean to start. So far for us, any sort of incident is taking a LOT more manpower to resolve. In part because it is complex, but in a greater degree because it is distributed. You tell it to do X, and the propagation of that change to the whole infrastructure may take 20 minutes, or it may take 10 days. It depends on what it is.
If you think you will "save" money by getting more features faster than something in house? Possibly. You won't have any less payroll, but it does take less time to wrangle a new feature's rollout and constrain it to your local policy than it does to craft middleware, hammer on shit, and or code something.
If you think you will save on hardware... depends on how you do it. VMs in the cloud cost more to run. SaaS can save you some money. But it's ever decreasing due to commodity hardware pricing trends.
The REAL value of the cloud, PERIOD, is real estate and infrastructure. We have a shit tone of networking closets. We have four decent sized machine rooms. Two of which at this point could be tier 3 data centers if they weren't at or beyond capacity for part of teir infrastructure. We also have to shithole datacenters that are verging on, if not outright, liabilities. We are building two more small data centers, but they aren't sized and located to really alleviate any pressure even if politics and turf wars didn't come into it. However, moving commodity stuff to the cloud means we should be able to promote at least one of our tier 2s to a tier 3, and we should be able to bring on a substantial quanity of new capacity without having to invest big dollars in renovating. The cloud is literally putting millions of dollars of capacity back at our disposal.
If you are a small company or startup, the cloud beats the pants off of having to find investors to fund the building/leasing of a data center. It's extremely scalable.
Enterprise 365 one drive is WAY different than commodity one drive. It is encrypted at rest and encrypted in transit. And implements perfect forward secrecy through it's clients and web access. We went into this with lawyers and the spanish inquisition because we deal with HIPAA regulations. The only non-standard thing we had to do was get them to sign an addendum to the contract that our data would only be hosted within the US.
Also, unless your guys are configuring something funky, unless using the web based apps, they don't default to using cloud storage and certainly don't make local storage inconvenient.
I'm certain that does occur. There are still valid reasons to make the move as I outlined above. Probably one of the things even the informed technical people overlook though is the cultural shift needed to not have the place collapse into chaos. The cloud services are almost never offline, they are however almost guaranteed to not be working for someone at all times if your organization is large enough.
lollerwaffle
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My knowledge about it comes from demos given by IT staff, trying to get us to like it. Which, even with decent IT staff, is a difficult thing to get right. I'm glad you pointed this out and it makes me breathe a little easier. If it's good enough for HIPAA it probably is good enough for us
Thanks!!
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I find the biggest issue with cloud services providers is what I like to call "lowest bidder-sized VMs".
In general, virtualization encourages efficient provisioning of VMs using only slightly more resources (disk, memory, CPU) than the VM actually needs at a given point in time.
However, for SERVICES, or SAAS, this can conflict DRAMATICALLY with "Work Tends To Fill Whatever Space Is Assigned To It".
One of our client's CRM had a modest 8 GB contact database. However, their attachment load was in excess of 300GB
Another client using the same package was rocking a 60GB database and their attachment load was over a TB.
And, even though we'd SPECIFIED server provisioning to the chosen cloud providers, in both cases, they made unilateral decisions to provision min-spec machines with insufficient memory and completely insufficient disk space to run the application once in place (or even temporarily house the compressed transplant.
The only thing they got right was CPU planning.
In the case of the client with the larger install, they didn't even seem to realize that they were NOT going to be running this app through the company VPN and masquerading as a local service.
Even though we'd spec'ed out for a bank of terminal servers.
Luckily WE weren't the ones who sold them the bill of goods in both cases. So we weren't to blame for the sub-optimal setups that then needed expansion.
In the case of the first company, they're still hosting. But the savings aren't anywhere near what they were promised due to the chintzy default provisioning pricing being increased to cover the beefier server images.
The second company was a cunt-hair away from suing until the provider caved and gave them the service at the initially promised price.
And by month 9 they were so underwhelmed by the service they were NOT in any mood to hurry up and pay even MORE for it.
So we wound up migrating them back. Luckily for them we still had the original servers.
So we did the migration in-house over 10-gigE and then simply pulled the last year of changes off the cloud server before cancelling.
And, through it all, my company wound up looking like heroes.
Not because we did anything special (and we definitely never tried to sabotage anything).
We did what was requested of us.
We even tried to help the in-house IT guy deal with the cloud provider.
We accumulated several thousand dollars of consultation/work time.
On top of that, we still collected our cut of the annual software maintenance.
Even so, it's still aggravating to see them wind up in the exact place you had initially spec'ed for them, but only after wasting months and thousands upon thousands of dollars in a failed platform.
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Totally agree
M76
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If you don't own the server then it is outsourced. No need to spin it any other way. As soon as you buy a service instead of hardware to run your own service you're outsourcing.
If you want full cloud service then it will cost much more than the manpower needed to keep your own systems working. Our IT guy works less than 1 hours / week. that's how much it needs to function.
Speaking based on some personal bad experience I presume? I've had experiences where one "guru" set up the systems for a company then vanished, and we ended up picking up the pieces when the system broke down. But that's the other end of the spectrum. There are steps between linux wiz kid, and a complex all out cloud service.
Cloud services, they might have the availability, but definitely not flexibility or cost. But the availability is offset by the internet availability, so in the end you're no better off. To work efficiently in the cloud you need much higher internet connection stability and speeds, which also comes at a cost. You can't just look at the cost of the cloud service itself in a vacuum. And the service cost is only small compared to initial expenditures when comparing to your own set up. The fees and upgrade costs of the cloud service (because you'll need to upgrade down the line definitely) will overrun the cost of maintaining your own systems probably within a year.
Nothing beats the cost efficiency and flexibility of having the hardware on site, and doing with it whatever you need or want to do with it. Availability will be down. But I prefer 90% availability where I can control when the 10% off time is, compared to 99% availability where the 1% can happen at any time.
They're pretty awesome at it, even before you've signed a contract they openly say you won't save money now, but we will give you all of this blablalbal.
It's not about saving money anymore, granted a 15 person business WILL save tons of money, however once companies reach 1000+ employee's they should start bringing things inside and run hybrids and use common sense.
It is always a challenge to justify costs to the CEOs though. Hard to look at the large upfront costs of in-house solution and then at a nice payment plan for cloud based service, plus it all seemed so simple when the sales guy explained it to you.
For those who say it is cheaper to host locally, your not doing it right. AWS offers lots of data storage options, monitoring, etc. so that you can tailor your setup to reduce cost. I also doubt you are taking into account utility, equipment, backup, and manpower costs. For most small businesses, especially new ones, the cloud makes total sense. You can't beat the scalability. As a side note, cloud hosting is also more efficient from an environmental standpoint. Most people who host their own hardware barely utilize the capacity. They are wasting resources with hardware running during off hours. Most businesses aren't running on renewables either. AWS, Google, and MS run their cloud infrastructure using a lot of renewables and they also purchase renewable credits to offset the power they use that isn't directly powered by renewables. Lastly, all of you pretend like you or these companies that host locally have security experts on site. Most on-site setups are managed by people who have no idea what they are doing. It's laughable that you think these companies know more about securing data than Amazon who has an entire team of the top talent available dedicated to ensuring their systems are set up securely.
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I did local IT with independent businesses and government offices for 13 years until 2013 and from that experience I'd say whether or not to use the "cloud" depends on three things:
1) The application (for example, very few host their own email anymore - that's been in "the cloud" for 10+ years); some applications very much benefit from cloud infrastructure's always-updated, always-uniform approach that can run on almost any computer or OS.
2) Whether or not you can backup your own data if and when you want to (if you can't, BAIL!)
3) The confidentiality of that data (no small business should be storing sensitive, liable information on the Internet)
I installed 1000+ computers in those 13 years, and when a customer tells you that they just go to a website to do their business vs. a local, custom application that was usually a big relief (I could focus on hardware health and not the eccentricities of someone's custom app). Nonetheless, I would ask about if/how they did backups, and the nature of the data. I switched people to and from the cloud based on the above criteria many, many times.
I think there will always be a "cloud" from now on; I'm just not sure of its scope going forward. I'm super-grateful email is largely cloud-based; I *hate* local email clients and even more than that, trying to run an email server in a small business (what a nightmare).
I'm enjoying this discussion. Thanks.
1) The application (for example, very few host their own email anymore - that's been in "the cloud" for 10+ years); some applications very much benefit from cloud infrastructure's always-updated, always-uniform approach that can run on almost any computer or OS.
2) Whether or not you can backup your own data if and when you want to (if you can't, BAIL!)
3) The confidentiality of that data (no small business should be storing sensitive, liable information on the Internet)
I installed 1000+ computers in those 13 years, and when a customer tells you that they just go to a website to do their business vs. a local, custom application that was usually a big relief (I could focus on hardware health and not the eccentricities of someone's custom app). Nonetheless, I would ask about if/how they did backups, and the nature of the data. I switched people to and from the cloud based on the above criteria many, many times.
I think there will always be a "cloud" from now on; I'm just not sure of its scope going forward. I'm super-grateful email is largely cloud-based; I *hate* local email clients and even more than that, trying to run an email server in a small business (what a nightmare).
I'm enjoying this discussion. Thanks.