In the clouds...

[EternalOptimist]

wowser. now the cloud can convert data into information. thats cool

[escapeUK]

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.

I do that, its called Microsoft Money. They dont sell it anymore as it didnt sell very well.

[Gentile]

I do that, its called Microsoft Money. They dont sell it anymore as it didnt sell very well.

Yes, Mint.com kicked their arse a bit. Not that Mint hasn't had its own difficulties too.

[oscarose]

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.

Cloud cookoo land old chap.

[vetran]

The Emperors new clothes situation.

Depends on the choice of tailors & Fabric.

If you get a decent tailor and fabric all should go well, if you go for a couple of guys off the street then you end up naked. Unfortunately in my experience the IT department will select the best tailors, the business will select the cheapest.

There is nothing sharepoint can't do, slowly...

[SimonMac]

The consultancy I am working at is pushing Azure quite a bit, for test/dev environments its not a bad idea, not too sure how much faith I would put in a production system, but what real difference is Azure to a local ESX farm?

[Scoobos]

Cloud cookoo land old chap.

WHS + 1 zillion.

[Scoobos]

what real difference is Azure to a local ESX farm?

Azure == handing the DOJ in the US the keys to your system.

Less tin foil hat wise, it's actually a pretty nice system - but if you have the in house resource to manage a local ESX farm then you're not going to save money going to Azure.

My serious bug bear with all this cloud *cough, INTERNET* hosted stuff is that you're usually handing support over to a bunch of people with absolutely no vested interest in your company, just their own.

I'm trying my hardest to pull a charity out of all this stuff right now, it just isn't cost effective in real terms; for them.

[Gentile]

Azure == handing the DOJ in the US the keys to your system.

Less tin foil hat wise, it's actually a pretty nice system - but if you have the in house resource to manage a local ESX farm then you're not going to save money going to Azure.

My serious bug bear with all this cloud *cough, INTERNET* hosted stuff is that you're usually handing support over to a bunch of people with absolutely no vested interest in your company, just their own.

I'm trying my hardest to pull a charity out of all this stuff right now, it just isn't cost effective in real terms; for them.

Frankly, I'd rather let a company that has dedicated their business model to providing a guaranteed uptime of 99.95% under their SLA look after the infrastructure that my solution runs on, than entrust the same responsibility to some underappreciated in-house techy.

As for handing the keys to your system over, provided you've encrypted everything competently there shouldn't be any risk of handing your data or your code over to anyone.

[MarillionFan]

All this talk of clouds is very interesting. But who truly knows what it's all about??

Anyway, can't hang around here I've got to be at a Cloud Conference in Palo Alto in an hour. I'll see if they know anymore.