Will we still love the data centre seven years from now?

I don't really think the lack of traction with small businesses to adopt the cloud is a real surprise. Making a decision such as going on the cloud is far more critical to a small firm, hence the readiness to cling on to what they have and know - even if it is unreliable/less cost effective/using obsolete apps etc.

Small companies can be conservative in regards to change, mainly as they prefer to see the cost effectiveness of ideas such as the cloud come down to a level where it makes no sense not to use them - and the technology is emphatically proven, reducing risk to their operations. And don't forget, many of them don't have access to decent data connectivity which rather hampers the online storage that is usually packaged with app hosting.

But the comments from 'Lusty' that small companies have empire building IT staff is just bong-eyed rubbish. Behave laddie.

PS - why can't I see the graphs?

Circle the Wagons!

This is an excellent study, and timely. I think some questions were missed, though.

First: "Do public clouds threaten your job security?"

Second: "What would an all-public cloud solution do to my IT staffing?"

Third: "What is the key reason for you not wanting public cloud service?"

Fourth: "If public clouds like Amazon are so cheap, could I hold back management pressure to migrate?"

Now those would really be interesting answers!

As would an answer to the question: "With three major outages, two viruses, and reqs for two more IT people this year, what is it about YOUR IT shop that will be better than the cloud?"

The bottom line is that people answer from their comfort zone. The answers in the article are real, but the motivations in the end are personal.

Speed of repair

I used to own a manufacturing company and I would evaluate online services by whether I could throw money at a problem or not. Online applications and storage are instances where my company could be brought to a stop by factors completely outside of my ability to throw money at the problem to get it resolved. I could invoice customers, pay bills, complete shipping documents and reconcile accounts even if my internet connection was down as my accounting software was on my computer. I didn't need to have a fiber connection to the shop since not everybody needed high speed access all of the time to do their work. With outside services, I also could not control the quality of employees that were there to (supposedly) help me. The outside company is out to make a profit. They don't care about my business, just whether my checks are good each month.

If the electric goes out, I can always run a generator. If the internet goes down, there is nothing I can do. So, I do not want to route all of my business functions through a bottleneck I can not control and could severely impact my profits and reputation.

Example of poor planning: My former web host uses VOIP for it's phone service. When they (and my web site) would go off-line, it's not possible to reach them by Skype or telephone. If they had POTS for even one local line with a system status message, I might have stayed with them. As it was, I could never reach them if there was an outage and could not find out if their problem was minor and would be resolved in minutes or if I was going to be down for a few hours.

Online services can be useful for backups in some instances or can facilitate having people working from remote locations. It's not a universal solution to every problem. Most enterprises are probably still better served from a local data center.

There was a nice article a while back where the author worked out some rough costs and timelines for restoring files from the Cloud based on several scenarios. It mostly pointed to the fact that it was cheaper and faster to buy a pallet full of hard drives and maintain on and off-site backups. Maybe a good business would be to fit a company's building with a fiber connection on the outside of a building and a back up storage vehicle would stop by on a schedule and back up a company's data (encrypted) and take it away for storage at a remote location. The vehicles could be electric and be getting a top up while they slurp the data. If there was a need for a restore, a data vehicle would bring the last backups to the company's location for a download. Hmmm. Gotta go write a business plan.