Cloud-should I migrate?

Whilst many are thinking of moving their systems into the cloud for cost, security and uptime, I would say think again. The principle of cloud is great, but I would suggest that setting up your own cloud with your own equipment is the better option. For example, once you have selected your provider based on your current needs and budget only to find in the future that a competitive provider has become a better option, how do you switch? Often this mean that your data must be bought back to in-house storage before it can be transferred. Once a company has been using cloud computing for 3 or 4 years it is doubtful that they would still have the storage and equipment to do this, after all wasn't the point of moving to cloud in the first place, to get rid of your kit and reclaim the space used to house it? The other issue would be the vulnerability to your company should your cloud provider make a mistake. An example of this was the recent 5 hour outage on Amazons cloud-computing which affected a large amount of web and app sites including Slack, Trello and Medium. According to an Article in the Telegraph, Amazon blamed a typo for the outage. Apparently an employee intended to remove a small amount of servers, but instead caused an unprecedented performance issue for thousands of companies. Whilst I accept human error effects us all, the point is, that whilst your on a cloud provider this is not your kit and you have to wait for them to locate and fix the error. Providers may priorities other customers before addressing your companies issues. If the kit is yours, and supported by your own team, this simply wouldn't be an issue. When evaluating the true cost of cloud from a provider or your own version, it is advisable to take all eventualities into consideration. It may of course be that you don't want to use cloud of any sort and just stick to your own Server Infrastructure hard partitioned.

posted on Friday, March 3, 2017