Lawyer up on your way into the cloud

worrying

That senior management and especially directors are following the herd and buying into "cloud computing".

If they are serious about saving money on hardware and duplication, they could have gone the "thin client" route years ago but few understood it!

Gee golly gee

So the moral of the story is that moving services to the cloud is an important project.

Wow, who'd a thunk it ?

The ironic thing is that here we have an international, world-class "communications" company that got blinded by the marketing spiel of cloud vendors only to find that the road to the cloud was not actually filled with grassy fields and daisies.

Somehow, that makes me smile.

Lawyer up?

Alternatively - don't bother and save the fees - if you're buying someting cos it says cloud on the packaging then you ain't going to listen to anyone's advice - you'll just sit there burbling "shiny - woot" and drooling down your tie. Either way - your pissing your money down the drain.

All true but I'm upvoting the article

Subject says it. This gets a big +1 for puncturing the hype and highlighting the reality. To put it in tabloid terms, if it saves just one CIO from making a tragic mistake ....

I'm with Bill 36 on this one.

(see above).

Just the number of "me too" cloud start-ups is enough to worry me! It's clear (at least to me) that this is a bubble. What happens when that bubble bursts, and these "me too" startups (who are are not profitable and rely solely on captial injection from investors) go bust? What happens to your companies' data? What happens to the 15 years of archived email?

The same thing happened in the early noughties with Thin Client computing? It failed for essentially four reasons:

* The technology wasn't actually as good as it was claimed to be;

* It actually turned out to be more expensive;

* Concerns over security of corporate data, either from random (damaging) attacks by idiots (resulting in loss of data), denial of service (down-time), or industrial espionage;

* One you had selected a vendor, you were pretty much locked in, in the sense that it was just to painful to move to another vendor. They had you by the balls.

Of course, it didn't live up to the hype, and all those pointy-haired salesmen ended up on the dole, and legions of office workers would turn up for work in the morning, boot their thin client, and instead of their desktop, they would get "Cannot connect to Citrix Server".

I fear this cloud thing may indeed go the same way for the reasons cited above. I do think the technology is better than the thin client days, but there are still technology issues, as cited in the article. I think the remaining three points cited above are just as relevant now as they were back in 2000.

Another idiot MBA is blinded by technobabble

“"We calculated that return on investment would be great and we could get large savings from putting our email in the cloud, but when we moved there were lots of problems,” he cautioned."

Unfortunately these are the sort of technologically pig ignorant idiots who become IT directors these days. Anyone with a clue would have asked the pertinent questions first and done a trial run. Clearly this muppet just fell for the sales patter hook and line.

Oh dear, there must be some idiots out there

I read this little pasage:

"A big cultural change has to happen especially among your developer community,” argued Dev

Kohol, executive director of enterprise infrastructure at Morgan Stanley.

“They don’t understand when you move to a service-oriented delivery model you become more

restricted. You can’t just call up the local sys admin or database guy and ask them to add this or

that feature.”

The result of reading was at first that Morgan Stanley has a complete idiot for director of enterprise infrastructure. Second thoughts suggested that I had been too hard on Morgan Stanley, and there was a careful and deliberate running together of two originally dseparated and clearly unrelated sentences (a very common journalistic strategem, which I'm sure I've seen nearly as often in El Reg as in The Guradian). My third thought was that the first thought was probably right after all, it's quite likely that Morgean Stanley has a director of enterprise infrastructure who is stupid enough to believe that it's usually developers, not users, who ask for new features - they'll be a typical financial services firm whose management think that way, despite all the evedence to the contrary that's right under their noses.