Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
No, for a business person, clouds are a seductive evil, and a very bad idea. Aside from issues of reliability, and company stability, and government seizures, if it's not on your hardware, it's not your data. It is irresponsible for any company to put its proprietary data on to someone else's server.
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That depends on the company and the type of information used.
We only store information that whilst we'd prefer to keep it private, if DropBox/GoogleDocs had a security breach and all our information was stolen, we'd not be impacted all that much. For some business' though, that would be a huge blow (not to mention the legal implicatons it has in certain industries)
Running your own servers isn't without risk though. Not every business hires compotent IT admins, a delayed patch or a mis-configuration could expose your data.
One important point any business should consider though, is if your service provider deleted your account this minute, could you continue trading with minimal impact.
Every situation has different trade-offs, in some cases keeping all hosting internal to the company is the only choice, in others a mixture can be better. The "cloud" isn't a perfect solution in all cases, after all it's still really just the old client/server setup we've had for many years with a little scalability added to the mix. It has the same risk/cost benefit trade-offs.