back to article Ellison's cloud conversion is good for business

For those agnostics who continue to doubt the reality of cloud adoption, there are two clear signs: the adoption of Amazon's public cloud and Larry Ellison's public cloud creation. The first is a sign of the appetite for cloud while the latter is a suggestion that even the cloud laggards have eventually found their way to their …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Trust Oracle?

    I doubt it would be wise to put much trust in a cloud from Oracle; in addition to the uncertainties that come with cloud solutions, Oracle will probably try to trap you and then up the prices until they choke you.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yes, because tea leaf gazing beats reality, any day.

    Is it a requirement for executives to not merely be adept at bandwagoneering ill- and misunderstood buzzwords, but also to actually believe in this executive bullshit, like how some analyst firm or other cranked up their crystal balls nine years into the future and that this is somehow more credible than the issues that the workforce is running into?

    If so, I'll happily paint myself completely unfit for CxOship.

    To me, this "cloud" thing is nice if you happen to be a silly valley or at least westpoindian startup or something. For bigger fish, close control of uptime becomes important and it's been reported a few times including here that, say, amazon isn't too big on providing that right when you need it most, that is when, not if, the excrement hits the air circulation device. Yes, this could all be fixed in theory. In practice, it's taking a while.

    And when you're not in westpondia, you'll quickly find that most clouds are westpondian-owned, and that regardless of whether they're located elsewhere, therefore the PATRIOT act ensures that you are not safe from prying eyes, and also that thus you don't actually have enough control over your own data to truthfully commit to the local privacy requirements. Contract law is simply not enough to ensure privacy or data security. If there's lawyers among the readership, go ahead and check your (data) outsourcing agreements, what guarantees and penalties are attached, and just how well that's going to help you should you need them.

    Notwithstanding that there's still a lot of suckers out there and that therefore there is a market for almost anything with enough buzz attached. For the more interesting tea leaf staring, figure out how much embarrasment the average CIO needs to clean up their act regarding privacy and data security. Throw a fancy graph at that, if you would. The ICO will be interested.

  3. Gordon 10

    Yet again

    Matt talks cobblers.

    Any engineer who goes to a public cloud in a lot of corporates would be fired on the spot. Most would regard it as a clear breach of infosec rules and in some cases legal and regulatory rules.

    Add the fact that most of those CIO's are running huge farms of VM's already it means there is little finical incentive to move either.

    The only plus point of clouds is agility - being able to spin up instances faster than some VM farms - and this is illusionary and caused mainly by internal issues rather that technology limitations.

  4. Mr Young
    Pint

    The cloud?

    And now we have 'false cloud' as well? I'm probably to old for this shit but I preferred when it was called 'distributed computing' or something like that? I'm no expert either - I've absolutely no idea how you could guarantee the security for example?

  5. 9tcd
    Unhappy

    The articles, since the move from UBUNTU, read more like the INFORMANTIONS on Television?!

    The articles, since the move from UBUNTU, read more like the INFORMANTIONS on Television?!

    It was enjoyable reading your thoughts on software and related topics. Lately, for me, they lack useful, informative, unbiased, columns.

    It would be nice to read columns similar in content and nature, that you penned during your tenure with UBUNTU/CANONICAL.

    May you be well and happy.

  6. FrankAlphaXII
    Alert

    Yet more cloud Nonsense, from El Reg's king of Nonsense

    If you want a crappy Hosting agreement running on VMs that are outside of your control, with no guarantee of security (Physical or otherwise), not available for inspection, and with no compensation when the whole system inevitably fails (like Amazon's does rather frequently) other than a nicely worded email to the effect of "Sorry, we messed up. Oh by the way, your lost data isnt recoverable. Here's a month free, have a nice day. PS: Sorry about you losing your job", then the so-called "Cloud" is for you.

    Its the dumbest idea Ive heard in a long time, and given that companies like Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft are hyping it, it tells me all I need to know. Its just hype, and it sickens me how many supposed professionals are diving into it without thinking.

    Seriously, get out a piece of paper, write down the definition of "Cloud" computing and read it to yourself. If it sounds like a good idea to you, PLEASE find a different line of work.

    I wouldnt go near it with someone else's 10 foot pole.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      All Hail The King Of Nonsense

      If only because I like the title. However, let's not forget that matt is now an executive type, or nearly so. Along with the pointy hair that means an outlook wildly different from the usual techie fare. One might speculate that most executives don't have the field of view to support looking that far and that the resulting strain on their poor brains means their sense gets distorted something fierce. But that doesn't change there's a substantial difference in viewpoint any way you look at it (insert obligatory groan here) and that it's very often more about perception, about spinning it this way or that way, that counts for success (among the politicking and in-fighting peers). This is practicality in an imperfect world speaking because politicking among managers is baaaad, hmkay (and a clear sign the machine needs greasing because all that effort spent infighting could've been spent making money instead), but it does happen a lot.

      And, yeah, you have a point that's often overlooked or ignored by them for this reason or another and that is that without real control over the assets critical to your business, the company is dancing under a ceiling full of swords hung by a single horse hair each. But boy what an experience, eh?

      It is, however, worth the read if only to try and understand just how broken brass-level thinking tends to be. Even if he doesn't pinpoint it himself (we do that), it does get out, and having seen it, readers can perhaps do something useful with it. Knowing where they come from one ought to be able to tell the brass in a way they understand just where they're taking the company.

      Cynically speaking failure and even high failure rate isn't much of a problem as long as it's recoverable. "Everyone knows" that things go pear-shaped now and then, and it's more important to recover than to have it never fail in the first place. Especially if you can justify the failing way with lower costs, conveniently disregarding "unquantifiable" costs of recoveryfrom (actually entirely predictable) failure. Even if the actual TCO (as opposed to the projected one usually used) turns out to be higher because a non-failing solution doesn't need expensive fixing. But that would be at the price of opportunities to shine and reap promotions. And if you-the-executive are quick enough, you've buggered off to greener pa$tures before the failures resulting from your (possibly deliberately, I'm sure I couldn't say) poor decisions turn out to be catastrophic enough to take divisions or even the entire company down with them.

      For honestly now, was not the executive racing rat its core business the taking of risks?

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Can" and "Should" are different. Cloud computing needs to be working in a robust manner for a period of time before it can make to the 2nd category. It is not enough for it to work. It needs to also work in a known and deterministic manner so as to be mangeable.

  9. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Alert

    How cloud could be adopted.

    For those that haven't noticed, there's a recession going on and likely to get worse. What happens will be like what happened previously when outsourcing was in vogue - the board meets to discuss cost cuts; they have been fed the male bovine manure by vendor X that outsourcing/public-cloud will save them money; the CFO over-rules the CIO and the business gets shafted. That's if the CIO puts up a fight - all too often they're thinking less than three years ahead to their next job and balling out before the brown stuff starts flying about. And then they may actually think it looks good on their CV to have cloud migration experience. And once you're in it's very hard to find the money to pull out and build up your own IT structure again, if anything you end up pushing more and more internal systems out of the company and into the hands of strangers.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Recession? What recession?

      I haven't had a proper job for longer than that. Burning out has effectively tainted me beyond all benefits and elegibility for any job as well. But anyway, for some superfluous brass logic.

      Given that buying into this cloud thing is not free, especially not in running costs, migrating back out again ought to be entirely TCOable. What's harder to justify is fscking around with critical infrastructure when you're stressed for resources like because of this recession thing. If you do anyway you're being irresponsible because of business continuity risks. With increasingly toughened corporate governance rules, that might see you personally sued. That is, unless the CTO forgot to explain just what the risks are here. Whoops.

      As to backing out, perhaps you could when there's cash floating around, perhaps when there's sudden reason to. Like, a series of breaches and (if you're lucky, only the risk of) PR disaster burns. Then you can buy into that private cloud idea and (easily, if the venduh hasn't lied too much to you) migrate to your shiny new cloud stack in that shiny nearby datacentre. For the problems with cloud are hardly technical.

      Then again, if you haven't a clue it doesn't matter whether you haven't a clue about the legal details or about the technical details or about the business continuity details or about the long-term sustainability details. You're brass, you just haven't a clue.

      So you could gather a bit of fluff for your CV and bugger off to the next CxO post at the next bigger company, of course. You could do that. How's Carly these days?

  10. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: Recession? What recession?

    One of our dinosaur sysadmins, who's seen it all before, says you should never underestimate the stupidity of a board looking to make cost cuts and get their bonuses! Seeing as I'm now of an age where I'm tired of job-hopping and instead looking to carve myself a comfie niche, I'm prone to be a bit defensive to outsourcing-dressed-up-as-the-new-big-thing. Having defeated one attempt to get us to outsource the corporate email to the cloud (yes, someone actually thought that was a good idea!), the cattleprod is charged and set to "fry" in anticipation of the next "new-big-thing".

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like