Space vs. the Cloud

One thing IT always says when objecting to the cloud is lack of control. IT can control the data center, it can't control the cloud. Usually this concerns security -- you can't protect what you can't control. Sometimes it concerns the data itself -- can you trust that it will always be there if you can't trust that the cloud provider will always be there? And there is performance. IT can control performance if it can control the network and define fast channels everywhere.

In each of these cases, cloud providers are great progress. For security, one could argue that a cloud company that's 100 percent dedicated to securing its site would do a better job than your data center that is trying to do twenty things at once.

Most of us, when we move to the cloud, go with large vendors and have backups of all our data somewhere, so there is no fear of it simply going away. And performance, while still an issue, can be dealt with through good WAN planning and by choosing what apps do and do not go on the cloud.

I thought I had all the big stuff settled until Elias Khnaser threw me for a loop. According to Elias we may have one more things to worry about: solar flares. What if one of these puppies takes out the Internet? One of Elias' clients brought up the possibility, so Elias scurried to his PC in search of an answer. Turns out that a flare strong enough to mess up the Internet would mess up everything, including your data center.

Posted by Doug Barney on 07/31/2012 at 12:47 PM