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Myths of the cloud
Jul. 29th, 2009 09:20 am[Posting from the conference]
For the umpteenth time, I've heard someone talk about the ease of switching to a different telecom provider if your current one went down or, worse, out of business. Maybe this is a regional thing, but it makes me wonder what they're smoking. I think a lot of these people have no idea to what degree core facilities and infrastructure are shared by more than one vendor, but usually operated by only one or two of them. There are places in this country where this is even more the case. Think northern BC or the Yukon.
Recent stories about businesses impacted by an FBI investigation into fraudulent use of VoIP services should come to mind. Yes, you can switch to a different data centre if your current data centre goes away. Can you afford it when your core functions are gone? It turns out, mostly you can't.
The IT blogosphere thinks of the cloud as some ubiquitous computing platform, but it's not. It's highly distributed in the sense that you and your services are not in the same place (I don't think I live anywhere near a Google data centre for example), but it's not ubiquitous. The network may be ubiquitous, but even that's highly variable. I do not have good network access at my parents' farm, for example. Not on the cellular network and not on land line networks.
For the umpteenth time, I've heard someone talk about the ease of switching to a different telecom provider if your current one went down or, worse, out of business. Maybe this is a regional thing, but it makes me wonder what they're smoking. I think a lot of these people have no idea to what degree core facilities and infrastructure are shared by more than one vendor, but usually operated by only one or two of them. There are places in this country where this is even more the case. Think northern BC or the Yukon.
Recent stories about businesses impacted by an FBI investigation into fraudulent use of VoIP services should come to mind. Yes, you can switch to a different data centre if your current data centre goes away. Can you afford it when your core functions are gone? It turns out, mostly you can't.
The IT blogosphere thinks of the cloud as some ubiquitous computing platform, but it's not. It's highly distributed in the sense that you and your services are not in the same place (I don't think I live anywhere near a Google data centre for example), but it's not ubiquitous. The network may be ubiquitous, but even that's highly variable. I do not have good network access at my parents' farm, for example. Not on the cellular network and not on land line networks.
