Reply to post: Re: A message to all who thought Office 365 was a good idea

Re: A message to all who thought Office 365 was a good idea

"When you scale the customer base up, each individual customer becomes less important and you have no possibility to hire a difference sys admin. Worse, there is a loss of skill in the alternatives to O365... until the price goes up. By then... too late. That's the price of monoculture and monopoly."

Although when you scale up, each individual customer becomes less important, the overall service uptime becomes far more important. If a cloud service is down, there will be articles like this written everywhere (even for a fairly low impact intermittent outage like this one). The cloud providers cannot screw up, ever, or this article happens. On prem IT has some intermitted fluttering of email for a few hours and there are calls into the helpdesk, IT says we are working on it, no one remembers a week later.

On the "hire another admin point", I think that is actually one of the greatest benefits of cloud. If your on prem IT has some sort of massive screw up, your only recourse is to fire that IT admin... which doesn't really fix the problem or put money back in your pocket. Cloud providers have SLAs, admittedly very low bar SLAs at this point... but they will be forced up by competition as the cloud services mature, which they need to hit or something is owed. There is zero chance that an internal IT department ever cuts the line of business a substantial check or gives them a future discount based upon a screw up.

I don't understand this cloud lock in argument that is throw around.... If you have some issue with Exchange or SQL or Oracle DB or SAP, etc on premise (they start hosing you on support for instance), are you going to just switch to a competitor? Maybe after several years... but still probably not. At worst, I think cloud services put you in the same position you're already in and potentially could make migration a viable option. People have been upset with IBM mainframe costs for decades and no one does anything.

On the what if Microsoft goes bankrupt situation, it seems supremely unlikely with MS (Amazon or some small SaaS provider might be a better hypothetical), but maybe some Lehman situation happens. In this situation, they would transfer the assets to a receiver and continue to run the apps until some unwinding can occur, like selling the cloud business to another company. I think it does make sense to look at the providers more carefully when considering cloud. You have more of an interest in their financial viability. Still though, what if your teleco went bankrupt and everyone walked away tomorrow... that would shut you down. Notice how little sleep you lose over that possibility.