Cloud Computing

Capt'n Midnight

Potatoeman wrote: »

It will cost local IT jobs if businesses keep their data in outsourced sites and Ireland is an unlikely hub for foreign countries to store data.

Remember Worldport ?

http://www.independent.ie/business/worldport-closes-dublin-office-with-the-loss-of-87-jobs-321987.html

WORLDPORT, the US technology company, has closed its $100m Dublin-based European headquarters with the loss of 87 jobs, the Irish Independent has learned.

Staff were told last night the company was closing the Dubin web-hosting facility as it has failed to generate sufficient business from Irish companies, it is understood.

The 125,000 sq ft facility in Blanchardstown, Co Dublin, was the largest web hosting facility in Ireland

That was back in 2001 when Eircom's business model was to per-minute dial up internet. Just because the home users and SME's didn't have BB worth talking about didn't mean we haven't had world class connections to the rest of the world. or yonks. Do you have any idea how much transatlantic bandwidth lands here ?

Our assets include our tax laws, mild climate - webfarm air con probably causes as much CO2 as air travel - , EU data protection laws , not being in the UK or US. Before privatisation we used to have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe. We don't have a history of industrial relations problems.

Of course we don't tick all the boxes or everyone, but for some customers we do

The Corinthian

Stiffler2 wrote: »

What's the difference between normal hosting & "the Cloud"

You don't own the hardware or maintain it, that's about it.

Unless you have your hardware in-house, chances are neither do you. Almost all enterprise solutions since the late nineties are put in data farms, typically including an SLA on maintenance. You might 'own' the hardware and you might even 'maintain' the server software, but in many cases companies do not and certainly they do not maintain the network.

Meanwhile smaller operations, and quite a few larger ones, still use shared or virtual hosting, which means you have little or no control or maintenance responsibilities.

The only exception to this rule is if you decide to host in-house, which is fine as long as you have a robust enough connection and not too much load (an intranet/extranet set-up normally). The only time I've seen this done in the last five years, is where the company wanted 100% control on data security for insurance reasons (e.g. banks) or had an IT department who wanted to secure their own jobs by creating more work for themselves.

BUT - you now also don't own your data - big security risk

How do you not own the data? AFAIK, you have IPR on all such data in cloud-hosted solutions, just as you have on a virtual server. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

granted - a few savings in cost of maintenance of a server but does that outweight the potential of having your data robbed, I would think not.

I've seen more instances of data breaches from in-house hosted servers than I think I'll ever see from third party hosts. The reason is simple; the latter are specialized in this area, while in most businesses (certainly SME's) the IT guy is a jack-o-trades or developer with this as a secondary job who as often as not will 'forget' to patch the server on a regular basis.

The reason people in IT don't like the cloud.
They tuk r dobs

I think the only people who don't like cloud computing are those who don't seem to have a grasp of what it is (or from what I can see, most hosting concepts) and who are threatened at the potential outsourcing that could come with it.

Cloud computing is, as a concept, is not going to work for everyone and sometimes it's just not a good idea for your solution. There's way too much hype and too little understanding in something which really isn't all that complex when you come down to it. But it can commercially make sense in many instances; as long as you know what you're talking about, that it.