In the clouds...

[MarillionFan]

You mean the sort of people who dont have a lot of money to spend on their internet connection? These are the last people who should be doing it.

All the businesses I work for want to control their own destiny, putting your data in a medium where they dont have control over the security, backup etc is of no interest to them.

One of the biggest business bug bears regarding data comes from finance or HR. Whereas the majority of data has no real value financial data or personal information does have ramifications. Where encryption is not enough it is possible to utilise SAAS solutions using an on-premise repository coupled with cloud storage to store all your data.

[escapeUK]

One of the biggest business bug bears regarding data comes from finance or HR. Whereas the majority of data has no real value financial data or personal information does have ramifications.

I dont agree. Technical, Sales and Production departments all generate data that is of great value and the business would struggle without it.

Each department thinks there data is most important, but in fact no business can survive without data from all departments. Im guessing you most often do work for accounts.

[Gentile]

I dont agree. Technical, Sales and Production departments all generate data that is of great value and the business would struggle without it.

Each department thinks there data is most important, but in fact no business can survive without data from all departments. Im guessing you most often do work for accounts.

True. And, FWIW, the startup I worked with that utilised Azure was dealing with financial data. I'm not sure why people get their knickers in such a twist over that type of information; it's not like it's in any way special when compared to other equally-sensitive data.

[MarillionFan]

I dont agree. Technical, Sales and Production departments all generate data that is of great value and the business would struggle without it.

Each department thinks there data is most important, but in fact no business can survive without data from all departments. Im guessing you most often do work for accounts.

As a BI Consultant I understand data more than most. Whereas it is critical for a department to run, housing data in the cloud normally runs into concerns over confidential financial and HR data. It is
normally the IT department who is resistant to change. SAAS models remove the need for expensive in house IT resources. I can see why you would be resistant.

The main concerns for housing data in the cloud relates to regulatory information or insider information. HR or Financial.

[escapeUK]

As a BI Consultant I understand data more than most. Whereas it is critical for a department to run, housing data in the cloud normally runs into concerns over confidential financial and HR data. It is
normally the IT department who is resistant to change. SAAS models remove the need for expensive in house IT resources. I can see why you would be resistant.

The main concerns for housing data in the cloud relates to regulatory information or insider information. HR or Financial.

I thought that might be what you meant, I think you got the words value and confidential mixed up in your previous post.

My main concern would be that it would be slow as sludge therefore unusable, insecure, and if the cloud company goes into liquidation what happens. And lets not forget when the internet goes down, so does the system. Routers fail, firewalls crash, and accounts forget to pay virgin. Its upsetting enough for the business to have no e-mail all day, but much more upsetting when they have no access to their system either. Im really not sure who its aimed at.

Im not resistant to it all, but knowing how to write a few queries is not like knowing how to actually define a solution architecture, its a bit like the dick head on here who was running a whole virtual machine just to surf on and another to download torrents on. Just because it can be done, does not mean it should be done, or is actually even necessary or desirable.

[MarillionFan]

I thought that might be what you meant, I think you got the words value and confidential mixed up in your previous post.

My main concern would be that it would be slow as sludge therefore unusable, insecure, and if the cloud company goes into liquidation what happens. And lets not forget when the internet goes down, so does the system. Routers fail, firewalls crash, and accounts forget to pay virgin. Its upsetting enough for the business to have no e-mail all day, but much more upsetting when they have no access to their system either. Im really not sure who its aimed at.

Im not resistant to it all, but knowing how to write a few queries is not like knowing how to actually define a solution architecture, its a bit like the dick head on here who was running a whole virtual machine just to surf on and another to download torrents on. Just because it can be done, does not mean it should be done, or is actually even necessary or desirable.

I would expect it to be slow as well. Present Clientcos offering is the fastest application of its type I have ever seen and it's browser based. I'll PM you the details to a demo system when I get home which has full admin rights as well as end user access. Have a play and let me know what you think.

[Gentile]

I thought that might be what you meant, I think you got the words value and confidential mixed up in your previous post.

My main concern would be that it would be slow as sludge therefore unusable, insecure, and if the cloud company goes into liquidation what happens. And lets not forget when the internet goes down, so does the system. Routers fail, firewalls crash, and accounts forget to pay virgin. Its upsetting enough for the business to have no e-mail all day, but much more upsetting when they have no access to their system either. Im really not sure who its aimed at.

Im not resistant to it all, but knowing how to write a few queries is not like knowing how to actually define a solution architecture, its a bit like the dick head on here who was running a whole virtual machine just to surf on and another to download torrents on. Just because it can be done, does not mean it should be done, or is actually even necessary or desirable.

Any business that uses technology is going to experience difficulty when their access to the internet goes down. At least if you're hosting your solution in the cloud and your office's access to the internet should fail because of a power cut or some other unforeseen event, your customers will still be able to interact with your product.

If you're instead hosting your solution in an onsite server, and your internet access goes down or anything else happens to that server, not only do you lose access but your business stops functioning as your customers are unable to access your product too.

As for speed and reliability, if anything the major cloud hosts are at the top end of the sort of bandwidth they can handle and uptime they can offer. And when it comes to confidentiality of the data hosted, it's relatively straightforward to encrypt your data so that no unauthorised person can access it, even if they had administrative access to the hardware it's hosted upon.

[escapeUK]

Any business that uses technology is going to experience difficulty when their access to the internet goes down. At least if you're hosting your solution in the cloud and your office's access to the internet should fail because of a power cut or some other unforeseen event, your customers will still be able to interact with your product.

If you're instead hosting your solution in an onsite server, and your internet access goes down or anything else happens to that server, not only do you lose access but your business stops functioning as your customers are unable to access your product too.

As for speed and reliability, if anything the major cloud hosts are at the top end of the sort of bandwidth they can handle and uptime they can offer. And when it comes to confidentiality of the data hosted, it's relatively straightforward to encrypt your data so that no unauthorised person can access it, even if they had administrative access to the hardware it's hosted upon.

Maybe we are thinking of two different types of system. I am thinking of a company's ERP system. What sort of system are you thinking of? Hotmail? Software downloads? My clients sell physical products they manufacture from raw materials. They need to be able to constantly see what they need to manufacture, what raw material they need to order.

And im not talking about the bandwidth at the cloud end, I am talking about it at the clients end. If the client can only afford a 10mb connection to the internet, and Im not talking ADSL here as that only tends to have 1Mb up, im talking expensive leased lines. Which would still be a fraction of the speed of the clients internal network.

[Gentile]

Maybe we are thinking of two different types of system. I am thinking of a company's ERP system. What sort of system are you thinking of? Hotmail? Software downloads? My clients sell physical products they manufacture from raw materials. They need to be able to constantly see what they need to manufacture, what raw material they need to order.

And im not talking about the bandwidth at the cloud end, I am talking about it at the clients end. If the client can only afford a 10mb connection to the internet, and Im not talking ADSL here as that only tends to have 1Mb up, im talking expensive leased lines. Which would still be a fraction of the speed of the clients internal network.

The system I was involved in allowed consumers to aggregate data from several financial products into one coherent application, thereby seeing a combined view of their wealth. So, if they had a credit card with provider 'A', a mortgage with Building Society 'B', a pension with life assurance company 'C', stocks and shares held by brokerage 'D', and a mixture of current and savings accounts with different banks, they could see that all information in one place. It helped customers by allowing them to set budgets, and receive alerts when their funds were getting too low in one place, indicating it would be advisable to move some of their money from one location to another. The main commodity being provided was coherence of information, rather than physical goods.

For the type of ERP solution that you're talking about, I guess you'd need to make an estimate of the percentage of traffic that would be coming from your client's site versus the volume that would be coming from customers placing orders online. If the latter is huge, then if they hosted the solution themselves they'd still need to pay for bandwidth to cope with that traffic (because they'd need to have a decent internet connection to allow their customers to communicate with their website on their physical server). If, on the other hand, it's a system where 99% of the traffic is from your client's own site to its own systems, then you're right that a cloud-based approach would make less sense for that sort of usage profile.

[oscarose]

I can handle most forms of Bullshit Bingo. The only one I really don't like is when I hear "SharePoint" bandied about as The Answer to everything, from bug tracking to project management to running their intranet (the latter of which is the only thing it could ever be any good at).

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