Data centres – should you outsource?

Cloud reliability is not there yet and local storage is getting cheaper, so there is less pressure on gambling ones business. Additionally high latency, when compared with a local network, mitigates against mission critical applications being cloud based.

Where hosted storage is a good solution, is that of off site disaster recovery storage which is not affected by latency problems.
 
Maybe the "journalist" (and I use this term loosely) should explain what "moving into the cloud" is at some point near the beginning of his article?
 
The answer to this is both yes and no.

Outsource non-critical services, and keep mission-critical inside the company.

If you outsource mission-critical services, and there's a telecomms outage/data center outage/whatever happens then your company won't be able to work, and will incur heavy losses.

If you do outsource non-critical services, and keep mission-critical services inside, and outage occur, then your company will be able to continue working.

If you want to do backups to data centers, make sure you also do backups in-house as well. Murphy's law dictates that the data center will be inaccessible should your only backup be stored at a DC instead of on-site when you need it the most.

Common sense. Use it.
 
I believe there is a good case to be made for outsourcing email for small to medium size companies (50 users+) that need enterprise class email - it's hard to make the case for redundant servers and storage on site including a proper archiving solution. Google Apps offer a great solution as well as some local Vendors offering hosted Exchange (at a much higher cost per user than Google).

Big problem with this is getting affordable and reliable redundant data lines. Right now this is not easily available in SA.
 
well our Main server sits a a DC cos of speed so that can remote into it and work on it as well. and there is never slow speeds issue. and then our local DB for shops is branch specefic each branch has there own Server with the local Point of Sale system sitting on it and then it just uploads to the main server at night which usually takes about 10 to 20 min to do then all 10 of our branches are backed up off site and we have access to the DC so it is never an issue if can not pull the DB over the net which ours is currently at around 25GB. can just go to data centre back it up onto another portable and take it to which ever branch is needed. so to me working in the cloud is a dam good idea. even all the documents are stored on the server at the DC and then once a week gets backed up to 2 portable drives and all of that is done automacticly so if have a setup like that then it is not a bad idea but where there is just one branch and there is people in the office and there is not multiple branches then better having a server in house and working that way then rather spend the money you would to host it at a data centre for a bonded adsl solution
 
Wow Labratza please use punctuation to separate your sentences - I found it difficult to read your post.

As far as bonded ADSL goes, I have implemented load balancing across 3 ADSL lines at a customer, which works well until you hit contention at the DSLAM or further up in Telkoms network. Try and get Telkom to do anything about that....
Also you are dependent on one Exchange/DSLAM - with no guarantee of availability from Telkom. We now have a wireless link as well, but that has come with it's own set of problems.

The reality is that we in SA need affordable fixed line broadband (like FTTH) to be able to do what the rest of the world are doing already. Even LLU could help, just we take forever to make any decisions and ICASA have proved themselves to be incapable of doing anything to improve broadband in this country.
 
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