[Cloud42] Why your business should move to the cloud  

I don't see how moving to a cloud for businesses is really any different than buying some hosting online.. It's fairly expensive still compare a few dollars a month in energy bills (with todays low TDP and all) plus initial setup costs to paying hundreds of dollars a year every year or risk not having a company server. In-house is still going to be the best.

For example if I move my SQL server to a cloud I now have to setup all software to connect to the cloud instead of local intranet, then I have to make sure I don't ever lose internet access or I lose my data! Finally after I move all my stuff in the cloud, set everything up, buy higher quality internet for the office and teach everyone whats going on I now have to pay each month to use my data and if I have a tough month where I might be able to delay paying the energy bill for a month or two, if I don't pay my cloud fees I can't work anymore! Well now what? How will I make money to pay for it? In today's struggling economy where you can go out any minute I don't believe cloud computing really is the future for us. In terms of large scale businesses-sure. They will prepay their cloud for years to come, and have backups with different providers. Heck some companies might even own a part of these cloud companies.

Also, when your cloud does mess up - and it happens, anything is possible who is to blame? Some company who doesn't care about your $50 bucks a month and will offer you some cruddy credit? Well if my IT guys mess up I fire them, bring in new guys and continue on my merry way, I don't let the same guys run my cloud after they mess up - even once. So now I'm going to be forced to move cloud companies and now I have to go and reconfigure everything once again...............

I have yet to see the logic of cloud computing other than some potential $$$ savings for some companies. I believe that it's mostly smoke and mirrors for most businesses.

I compare Exchange to Gmail where you have to admin Exchange but not admin Gmail.

With Exchange, you own everything. Your data is on your servers with your security.

With Gmail, google owns everything. Your data is on their servers with their security, along with hundreds of other companies. What type of access do admins @ google have to your email? Who and what reads the emails and where does that information go?

i m paranoid

Well I'm gonna take a wild guess that companies offering Cloud computing are going to be prime targets for hackers compared to some unknown small or medium sized Biz no one knows or cares about. So if security is your prime reason for using Cloud computing then depending on the size of your Biz that may or may not be a good reason to use Cloud. It may be as good or better to have your own IT dept. and security.

I'm still not convinced. I co-own/co-manage a small business and this is roughly my thoughts reading that article:

Energy costs: Negligible. We only use 9 workstations, an off the shelf NAS box, a homebrew Athlon II X2 based file server, and a handful of laptops and netbooks. We'd probably lose more money paying for the cloud service than we would save on our electric bill by downsizing the workstations.

Staffing costs: N/A. Everyone here fulfills multiple roles. Our IT staffing cost is $0.00.

Security: The file server in our livingroom is far more secure than any machine that exists outside our office. Who knows who gets access to the machines at a cloud service company?

Performance: Local hard drives + Gigabit ethernet v. 1.5Mbps T1 ISP. No contest - the local solution is significantly faster.

Availability: So long as we have electricity, we can keep working. If the power goes out, we can fire up a generator. Redundant hardware and backups let us quickly recover from hardware failure. With a cloud based system, there are a number of points of failure - FBI shuts down cloud service provider, lost internet connection, uncertain hardware redundancy at the cloud service provider, no direct access to restore from backups if the need arises, dependance on employees that don't care about your business to fix problems . . .

Licensing costs: We're small enough that it's cheaper to license every workstation individually than to buy a cloud/area license.

Because ISP's will earn lots of $$ charging you when you go over your bandwidth limit.

The cloud isn't new. It's been around for a long time.

While I do see advantages, after seeing what happened to JotForm.com ... I wouldn't be keen on the cloud at all.