Over 50? Barr humbug
10-15 years time and businesses will all be using the cloud? The 'Kiddies know best?
Guess I must be a dinosaur as I'm over 50 and one of the people holding the cloud back unnecessarily. Couldn't be a bit of self interest in making that statement could there John? After all you are Rackspace CTO. But as CTO how are you at running a business?
Would you trust AWS or MS to host your whole IT operation? Would you recommend it to your board? Yes I know its a silly rhetorical question, but there are many reasons why it's not being adopted as fast as you may like.
1. It's still new and having teething problems. Yes it will settle down, we'll learn from major outages and we'll improve it. Personally I think adoption in 10-15 years is way to far off. If the suppliers get it right, 3-5 years may be more appropriate.
2. It's not a strategic option for ALL business data. Strategically I support cloud computing for customer facing activity. Web site are a great leader in this field. Can anyone accurately predict how many people are going to hit a web site after a TV ad? With the cloud, its not a problem. In fact a perfect solution. With business critical data.... Much more caution is needed. Even the humble finance system's data if it got into the wrong hands by mistake could give a competitor a massive advantage....
3. Can we really trust the suppliers? Nothing personal, but in my time I've seen suppliers be really nice and friendly to get your business, but if you want to move your business or they go out of business. Who own's YOUR data? In todays world, its simple, if a supplier get shirty when you want to change, or goes bust you have protection because it's all running on your hardware and will continue to run on your hardware (yes you will have problems) so your business will still function, it will also only be one supplier not every single bit of IT you use that goes or has problems. Even your 'kiddies' understand this argument, so you can imagine how easy this argument is to sell to a board.
May be I'm a dinosaur - but I make a lot of money out of being a dinosaur and keep being re-employed simply because I keep my thoughts grounded in the reality of the world not the spin. :-)