Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.
There is no one answer that fits all. Where cloud will always be cheaper is data storage.
If you were to host everything on-prem, that would be a lot of capex. It would cost to maintain that as well. For on-prem, you have to think more about electricity, redundancy, backups, security, and so on. Anything you would need to do to build out a data center. Once you have it set up though, yes it would be cheaper.
For tech companies, this is already a non starter as they want to scale and scale fast. They also can’t just spend all their investors money, so they convert capex into opex instead.
Also, historically, IT is slow. Very slow. This is why there is a world of DevOps because developers became increasingly frustrated with how slow it is to provision infrastructure for them. To fix this, you could probably hire more people, but again, that’s an extra expensive that you can just now offset to cloud.
With cloud you can set up something in multiple data centers within minutes. If on-prem, you would need to have multiple physical locations of your own.
Another option is to rent out space in a data center, then you just buy your own hardware and do not have to worry about 80% of what would go into a data center. You would still need to set up these systems in a way that can scale for future use, which means more capex up front.
At the end of the day, there is no one size fits all. As you mentioned, most businesses could benefit in the long run by hosting their own stuff. I will say though, managing things like your own email server has become a nightmare. This is just a lot easier to let someone else manage. Then again, you have the concern of data storage, this is just easier and cheaper to host in cloud. Something like Google workspace or m365.
To put it another way, go to your boss and tell him you need to pay $2,000,000 up front for IT hardware. Now tell him you’ll need to pay $250,000 a year for the same services in cloud. What do you think they will go with?
I do hate that it’s come to this though, because I feel like people are losing knowledge. Only the people that build data centers these days will have that IT knowledge and you have people that can no longer tinker like we used to.
Yes, thank you, I think this is exactly what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate properly.
I do feel there’s a great loss of knowledge in IT, but I’m also aware that I’m motivated by my own opinions and fear of job stability here. There are absolutely times when the cloud makes sense, and those arguments about capex v. opex nail it. I’d love to blame it entirely on greedy execs, but that upfront cost is hard to swallow for a new business, whether you’re planning on super/hyper scaling or not. Cohosting in a datacenter is a great option, but even then, most people simply won’t be willing to invest the time, as you put it.
I’ve had the luck of working for stable institutions like banks and biotech in the past where they built out their infrastructure for security and reliability properly and it was wonderful. I’ve also had the misfortune of working for hyperscaling startups with zero trust architecture built in Azure. It was a nightmare and I hated every day of it.
Like most things, the path forward is going to require a delicate balance, but there’s absolutely no fucking trusting Microsoft. When Europe says, “Hey, we’re getting nervous about your influence here” the response isn’t:
“In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. That is why today Microsoft is announcing five digital commitments to Europe. These start with an expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, aimed at enabling every country to fully use these technologies to strengthen their economic competitiveness. And they include a promise to uphold Europe’s digital resilience regardless of geopolitical and trade volatility.”
I mean, of course that’s what they’d say, but still. Fuck 'em.
Of course, stuff like that doesn’t happen everyday or to everyone. But will knowing that you’ve just been fucked by random chance help you when it happens?
If you can, do selfhosting. If you can’t, at least have backups somewhere other than the cloud, because the cloud is nothing more than someone else’s computer. And if it’s someone else’s computer, the weakest link in the chain of security is always a human, who may or may not be an idiot or who may have a bad day.
If you’re in Google Cloud, you should have data backed up in something other than Google cloud, this is no different to having all your data in a basement which could be hit by natural disasters, randomware etc.
Hopefully the Unisuper example provides a good enough example for IT professionals to argue for funding for external backups and that the cloud isn’t a reason to not have them.
That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.
The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:
Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone removeds it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…
Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might removed something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.
In my org email went to shit after they outsourced it and lost the institutional knowledge. Now we suddenly have random things happen, like a second layer of quarantine appearing, and nobody can explain it. Any support request is copy pasted forward and backward to the outsourcing provider. If the outsourcing provider’s response makes no sense it’s forwarded to you internally none the less, and without comment.
My colleagues tell me that back in the nineties we were running an X.400 email gateway in this very company before it was clear that Internet email would be the one to win the protocol wars. We were at the forefront of email developments then.
And we’re still a god damn tech company. We’re a registry (not registrar), network provider, security services provider, cloud provider, etc. But email is now apparently too hard for us, it’s a sad state of affairs.
Sure, the cloud is a cancer on computing. It may make some sense for large corporations but for small and medium business it takes away their agency. IT staff should be developed and in house coding should be the norm.
Allowing cloud and AI to run everything is a recipe for disaster.
They keep telling us the cloud allows us to scale. Ok, but why must everything be on it? Surely you could use both. Get our own hardware and if we have a flood of new customers stick the extra ones on the cloud server for a while. It’s all just VMs anyway.
Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.
Anyone more knowledgeable care to weigh in?
There is no one answer that fits all. Where cloud will always be cheaper is data storage.
If you were to host everything on-prem, that would be a lot of capex. It would cost to maintain that as well. For on-prem, you have to think more about electricity, redundancy, backups, security, and so on. Anything you would need to do to build out a data center. Once you have it set up though, yes it would be cheaper.
For tech companies, this is already a non starter as they want to scale and scale fast. They also can’t just spend all their investors money, so they convert capex into opex instead.
Also, historically, IT is slow. Very slow. This is why there is a world of DevOps because developers became increasingly frustrated with how slow it is to provision infrastructure for them. To fix this, you could probably hire more people, but again, that’s an extra expensive that you can just now offset to cloud.
With cloud you can set up something in multiple data centers within minutes. If on-prem, you would need to have multiple physical locations of your own.
Another option is to rent out space in a data center, then you just buy your own hardware and do not have to worry about 80% of what would go into a data center. You would still need to set up these systems in a way that can scale for future use, which means more capex up front.
At the end of the day, there is no one size fits all. As you mentioned, most businesses could benefit in the long run by hosting their own stuff. I will say though, managing things like your own email server has become a nightmare. This is just a lot easier to let someone else manage. Then again, you have the concern of data storage, this is just easier and cheaper to host in cloud. Something like Google workspace or m365.
To put it another way, go to your boss and tell him you need to pay $2,000,000 up front for IT hardware. Now tell him you’ll need to pay $250,000 a year for the same services in cloud. What do you think they will go with?
I do hate that it’s come to this though, because I feel like people are losing knowledge. Only the people that build data centers these days will have that IT knowledge and you have people that can no longer tinker like we used to.
Yes, thank you, I think this is exactly what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate properly.
I do feel there’s a great loss of knowledge in IT, but I’m also aware that I’m motivated by my own opinions and fear of job stability here. There are absolutely times when the cloud makes sense, and those arguments about capex v. opex nail it. I’d love to blame it entirely on greedy execs, but that upfront cost is hard to swallow for a new business, whether you’re planning on super/hyper scaling or not. Cohosting in a datacenter is a great option, but even then, most people simply won’t be willing to invest the time, as you put it.
I’ve had the luck of working for stable institutions like banks and biotech in the past where they built out their infrastructure for security and reliability properly and it was wonderful. I’ve also had the misfortune of working for hyperscaling startups with zero trust architecture built in Azure. It was a nightmare and I hated every day of it.
Like most things, the path forward is going to require a delicate balance, but there’s absolutely no fucking trusting Microsoft. When Europe says, “Hey, we’re getting nervous about your influence here” the response isn’t:
I mean, of course that’s what they’d say, but still. Fuck 'em.
If you’re thinking about cloud hosting, read up about how google accidentally deleted the whole of australias pension funds account and maybe think twice about if you can afford to lose everything you have in the cloud.
Of course, stuff like that doesn’t happen everyday or to everyone. But will knowing that you’ve just been fucked by random chance help you when it happens?
If you can, do selfhosting. If you can’t, at least have backups somewhere other than the cloud, because the cloud is nothing more than someone else’s computer. And if it’s someone else’s computer, the weakest link in the chain of security is always a human, who may or may not be an idiot or who may have a bad day.
If you’re in Google Cloud, you should have data backed up in something other than Google cloud, this is no different to having all your data in a basement which could be hit by natural disasters, randomware etc.
Hopefully the Unisuper example provides a good enough example for IT professionals to argue for funding for external backups and that the cloud isn’t a reason to not have them.
Yes, a backup in a different location is necessary either way, I should have worded that better.
I still prefer selfhosting, if feasible. Having data sovereignty has it’s benefits.
That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.
The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:
Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might removed something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.
In my org email went to shit after they outsourced it and lost the institutional knowledge. Now we suddenly have random things happen, like a second layer of quarantine appearing, and nobody can explain it. Any support request is copy pasted forward and backward to the outsourcing provider. If the outsourcing provider’s response makes no sense it’s forwarded to you internally none the less, and without comment.
My colleagues tell me that back in the nineties we were running an X.400 email gateway in this very company before it was clear that Internet email would be the one to win the protocol wars. We were at the forefront of email developments then.
And we’re still a god damn tech company. We’re a registry (not registrar), network provider, security services provider, cloud provider, etc. But email is now apparently too hard for us, it’s a sad state of affairs.
Cloud hosting is not the answer for everyone.
It was a meme sold to the public by people richer than us so we give up even more control while opening another lifeline to our wallets.
Sure, the cloud is a cancer on computing. It may make some sense for large corporations but for small and medium business it takes away their agency. IT staff should be developed and in house coding should be the norm.
Allowing cloud and AI to run everything is a recipe for disaster.
They keep telling us the cloud allows us to scale. Ok, but why must everything be on it? Surely you could use both. Get our own hardware and if we have a flood of new customers stick the extra ones on the cloud server for a while. It’s all just VMs anyway.
It definitely is not for everyone.