The last couple of days has brought a lot of speculation regarding Cloud computing, it all began with Microsoft‘s Azure cloud service crashing this past weekend. This was it’s first crash but it was a big one with it being down for 22 hours between Friday and Saturday. Azure itself is still in beta and up to this point has been fairly reliable which is a good thing for Microsoft.
Many companies were expected to be contemplating the switch to Cloud based services with the slowdown in the economy, but it has not been as quick of a move as many expected. With moving an infrastructure to the cloud there are several very big things that concern most companies that was outlined in a recent survey done by Microsoft.
Security, loss of control, increasing costs, all are very valid concerns that were expressed in this survey of 500 CIO’s. While some considered moving to more cloud based services, 13 percent actually decreased their usage of them due to the economy. My own belief is that at this time especially it is better to rely on a dedicated IT staff that knows your systems and more importantly your business.
Frequently companies decide that they need to save costs on IT by outsourcing it but in the long run it ends up costing much more than it should. Everything has hidden costs added to it but the most dangerous of all is lack of control. Cloud services should be complimentary to your current infrastructure and not simply replace it.
Check It Out> Silicon.com, Azure crash
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