Where the cloud is, and who owns it

Hahaha and that is why cloud is taking off. But if the **** hits the fan, whose problem does it become? The cloud is just someone else's computer.
 
You guys make it sound that the cloud services of large companies are one pc in a corner. They have data replication across different locations and other fancy things, so I am not sure what you are so worried about.
 
Wasabee! said:
You guys make it sound that the cloud services of large companies are one pc in a corner. They have data replication across different locations and other fancy things, so I am not sure what you are so worried about.
Click to expand...

Data destruction is not the only risk
 
The funny looks you get from people when explainin cloud services...priceless
 
Wasabee! said:
You guys make it sound that the cloud services of large companies are one pc in a corner. They have data replication across different locations and other fancy things, so I am not sure what you are so worried about.
Click to expand...

You'd be surprised how often this happens. I've come across a lot of dodgy SAAS providers. Many of them found cloud as a good way to get around a poor product - they sell it as cloud and then tell you it's cloud, you don't have to worry about anything, but when we have dug deeper, the actual infrastructure underpinning it is often very poor.
One product we looked at, the company confirmed that their software was highly redundant and we didn't have to worry about anything. We asked them why we couldn't do on-prem and they advised that the installation was too complex. Before cloud, they used to sell their product as a VM appliance. Alarm bells were ringing already, but we pushed them for further info on their redundancy and they admitted that they had multiple servers - in the same datacenter. And backups to disk - in the same datacenter. Basically if anything happens to the one datacenter, we would loose everything.
They were not the worst though. There was another SAAS product we looked at where there was only a single primary server and a backup server in their offices (single site) and the reason they only had their product as a "cloud" offering was because their primary "developer" needed to keep running SQL scripts on the fly to fix data and to get processes to work. That doesn't fly in our organisation where data changes need to be tested before being promoted and no-one is given free-range to databases. I did ask them why they called their solution cloud and they said it was because it was available over the internet...

The big players won't do this kind of dodgy dealing, but you need to watch out for a lot of these startups. Even seemingly larger players like Cloud Spaces don't necessary take disaster recovery seriously.

Note: Cloud Spaces had replicated data across the globe so didn't think offline backups were necessary. They were hacked and their data was deleted with the deletions replicated to all their sites. They closed shop shortly thereafter leaving their customers in the lurch.
 
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