Don Dodge's post on Cloud Computing: Do You Really Want Your Data in the Cloud? has a great opening statement:
Reliability, scalability, security, and a host of other issues will prevent most businesses from moving their mission critical applications to hosted services or cloud based services. The risk of failure is too great.
Don Dodge is Director, Business Development at Microsoft. He handles Venture Capital relations and business development with start-up companies in the Boston area. His criticism of uptime problems at Amazon EC2, Typepad and Twitter are apparently ample proof for him that "most applications will not move to the Web".
I offer several points In rebuttal -
1) There are already a tremendous number of applications and data on the Web already - from SaaS offerings like Salesforce.com and Google Apps to big professional hosting companies like Verio and Rackspace.com and smaller guys like John Companies. Customers like IT services in the cloud because IT is not their core business and the service levels and performance they can get in the cloud is worth every penny of management attention. There is so much complexity involved in IT operations and security in today's fast-moving threat environment that any business is best served by focusing it's attention on it's own sales and not on data security.
2) There is more involved than data availability in the cloud - there are critical customer service and IT operations issues as well.
The level of information security, network management, server engineering, data integrity, backup services, operations and customer service at a hosted service is far beyond what virtually any business can afford to provide. Software Associates (our company) are professional systems developers with high levels of expertise in Linux and security and last year we migrated all our messaging to Google Apps - simply because our time is better spent on the business and not on maintaining Spam Assassin.
3) Convenience trumps security except in a small number of cases. Mr Dodge, since he works for Microsoft should know that consumers and most corporate business organizations prefer convenience to the headache of being on the bleeding edge of security.
4) A more subtle point is the ability of an organization to stay on top of customer data and IP protection issues if they run their own server farm. Unless I am mistaken - none of the security breach events in the past 5 years happened at a managed service providers, SaaS operations or professional hosting. We're talking banks and large retail organizations here that constantly get stung by trusted insider attackers and malicious hackers.
There is actually a huge advantage in not storing your data inhouse - the exposure to trusted insiders is almost nill.
5) Microsoft makes great software and has aspirations to become a SaaS application provider. Although disappointing for Microsoft, their lack of success in this space is not surprising because IT in the cloud requires an entirely different skill set than developing and marketing great client/server software.
Cloud computing is an important tool for collaboration in the global developer community - all the more reason to reject callow remarks on the future of cloud computing from a Microsoft executive.
