Cloud the future or not?

[Laptop65]

One part of the IT industry that has risen to popularity (especially during this year) is the advancement of cloud technology. Instead of running your own in-house IT setup, you instead pay a provider (Amazon / Google / Microsoft) to run it all for you in a large data-centre.

Microsoft for example are becoming very aggressive with their cloud roll-out, they are retiring older "non-cloud" certifications so you can only study Cloud certificates now. In addition they are moving more and more over to "subscriber only" software packages. One example of this is Microsoft Office, originally Office 2019 was going to be subscriber only but due to so many people complaining Microsoft allowed people to be able to buy Office 2019 as a one-off payment as usual. However in the future it is clear that Microsoft want to be cloud-based / subscription-only as much as possible.

However there are still arguments against cloud, one being the cost (it is almost always more expensive and the fact that you will always have to pay for it as long as you want it), another point is data protection (where exactly is the data stored in the world?) and finally the unlikely event an entire data centre goes down then you are at the mercy of the vendor trying to get it up and running.

Does anyone else feel that cloud is the inevitable future? Or will many companies still choose to keep their infrastructure in-house?

 

Most of those objections are already being addressed by the major cloud providers.

Data protection - Major providers are getting certifications/audits to be compliant with different security and compliance standards. Physical access controls, software and hardware security layers, control over datacenter locations where information is stored.

Data availability/data center going down - A lot more likely for your on-site datacenter to go down than a major cloud provider. They have redundant hardware, network, power. Your virtualized infrastructure can be replicated across hosts, datacenters, countries, or all across the world as well.

Cost - I think this is one of the major reasons a lot of enterprise is staying on-prem or using hybrid solutions. Cloud can still be expensive. Still, I think large enterprise will go for the enhanced capabilities. There are lots of offerings coming out targeting SMB customers as well so depending on the application cloud may still be cost effective.

In my opinion in all models are still viable. Type of deployment really coming down to budget and specific business objectives. My guess is in the next 5-10 years we will see more cloud adoption but the on-prem/hybrid models not going away.

 

Cloud will definitely be a factor in the future.

Cloud has proven to be immensely useful in that it allows people with new ideas and little resources (think: startup companies) to spin up what they need to get a minimum viable product out there and eventually scale it up in an automated fashion if it sees success.

Simply put, Cloud enables agility through on-demand pricing and usage-based fee structure.

While Cloud has many advantages, there are absolutely several large negatives to it - much like Darkest Dream has already outlined.

Ultimately, whether Cloud is necessary or not will depend on the requirements of the organization and scope of whatever it is you are considering. For example, within certain industries in certain countries, data is required to be maintained in an on-premises environment. If your given organization recognizes IT as a core competency, you may also choose to run part or all of your infrastructure internally.

 

[Claire Lovely]

Cloud is a great technology but one drawback I find with many of the larger cloud services is that they are not open source and it is difficult to tell how they are optimized or how data is actually stored. I would like to see more open source solutions that have E2E encryption.

 

[Bill Gutrie]

I think that cloud technologies have a big future. It is a better way to keep a high volume of data and protect it. Also, there are a lot of modern technologies are synchronized with cloud storage.

 

[Juws]

The Cloud is already the future, we are living in it. Seems that the Cloud is infinite whereas other stuff is bound by finite.

 

[NBD16]

IoT/Cloud technology is great, the fact that you don't need physical storage and the cloud is pretty secure compared to other hosting techniques.

There is a reason Microsoft implement Azure and Amazon have AWS, these companies know the advancements of technology and the benefit it brings. A lot of businesses with server sided/database storage make use of this.