Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.
Anyone more knowledgeable care to weigh in?
That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.
The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:
- Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
- Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
- Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
- Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
- Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
- Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…
Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.
If you’re thinking about cloud hosting, read up about how google accidentally deleted the whole of australias pension funds account and maybe think twice about if you can afford to lose everything you have in the cloud.
Of course, stuff like that doesn’t happen everyday or to everyone. But will knowing that you’ve just been fucked by random chance help you when it happens?
If you can, do selfhosting. If you can’t, at least have backups somewhere other than the cloud, because the cloud is nothing more than someone else’s computer. And if it’s someone else’s computer, the weakest link in the chain of security is always a human, who may or may not be an idiot or who may have a bad day.
In my org email went to shit after they outsourced it and lost the institutional knowledge. Now we suddenly have random things happen, like a second layer of quarantine appearing, and nobody can explain it. Any support request is copy pasted forward and backward to the outsourcing provider. If the outsourcing provider’s response makes no sense it’s forwarded to you internally none the less, and without comment.
My colleagues tell me that back in the nineties we were running an X.400 email gateway in this very company before it was clear that Internet email would be the one to win the protocol wars. We were at the forefront of email developments then.
And we’re still a god damn tech company. We’re a registry (not registrar), network provider, security services provider, cloud provider, etc. But email is now apparently too hard for us, it’s a sad state of affairs.
Sure, the cloud is a cancer on computing. It may make some sense for large corporations but for small and medium business it takes away their agency. IT staff should be developed and in house coding should be the norm.
Allowing cloud and AI to run everything is a recipe for disaster.
