'Europe two years late' to the US cloud party Cloud adoption in Europe will lag the US by a minimum of two years due to concerns over data privacy, security and regulations. Or so says abacus-stroker Gartner, which reckons that the eurozone's economic meltdown won't help either. "The opportunities for cloud computing value are valid all over the world, and the same is …
Isn't that just the way it goes? At some point you reach a certain standard of living and say 'Yeah, that's it, this is fine, we're not going to kill ourselves any more,' and just coast.
In the US we don't have to pay overtime, don't give nearly as much vacation, and our privacy and consumer laws are written for the corporations, so we can run rings around Europe on something as fluid as this.
Of course, our companies look at places like India and China with envy and say to themselves 'Wow, we could literally work people to death and you'd have 20 more lined up to take the job before the body was even cold! How nice!'. They still lack talent - so as someone who works with Indian and Chinese coders, I have no fear at all for my job at the moment, since they're negative productivity. But at some point they'll get it together and then we'll languish in senescence too. I have no doubts about that. That's civilization for you!
This is excellent planning by the sounds of it. Just like we're told "never install version 1", it's only sensible to let someone else take the risk, find the problems and iron-out the bugs before committing to a new way of "doing" computing.
Maybe once all the concerns regarding getting your stuff into a cloud environment, getting it out again if the worst happens (and it will), learning how to deal with cloud suppliers who go bust, outfits that don't have top-rate security - or service provision - and learning how to recognise all of these pitfalls. After the problems of where the hell your data actually resides and who controls it have been sorted out we'll then be in a position to ask the basic question:
"What real, hard, monetary and business benefits do I get from handing over the IT part of my business to some complete strangers?"
can start to be addressed. If the answers to all these points makes it clear there are benefits and manageable risks, then - and only then - would it be worth considering.
I'd be deeply hesitant to hand over any valuable data without iron clad laws and procedures in place to protect it. Just common sense really. The advantages of clouding computing are huge, but you have to consider these things.
And frankly the U.S government attitude to data is scary. No way I'd trust anything vital to a U.S company, not when it can be accessed by such nosy prats with ease and without notice.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
When they are 10 years late they will be able to Nelson laugh at all the suckers who've had to do last minute provider migrations because the one they bet their business on goes titsup, or simply decides that since they can't be the world #1 cloud provider then it is not worth their while to play in that market and pulls the plug.
And they can also laugh at all their competitors every time they suffer yet another Azure outage.
And they can have a good cackle at their anyone who is subjected to an FBI datacenter raid where all their servers replete with customer data are swiped by the U.S. Government because the guy in rack 42 was running a file sharing website which caught Hollywoods eye.
I say good on Europe for not succumbing to the Sirens call of so-called "cloud computing"
I'm still not sure why el reg pushes that marketing nonsense so hard.
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