Unprecedented number of customers swimming off to cloud, says Barracuda Barracuda customers have started moving data and applications to the public cloud at a surprisingly fast and unprecedented rate, with on-premises IT facing a rocky road to becoming a wasteland. So says Michael Hughes, the company’s EVP for worldwide sales. For every app and accompanying data that is moved to the public cloud …
and it will all end in tears.
Not a lot of people know this but Moses 11th tablet was actually a surface pro with office 365. It had a notepad document open and it said thus "Thou shalt not be stupid enough to put all your eggs in one basket regardless of how upper management try to force you, thou must make them repent their sins for the BOFH knows the true path"
However, it didn't boot up so the message was lost.
"Not a lot of people know this but Moses 11th tablet was actually a surface pro with office 365. It had a notepad document open and it said thus "Thou shalt not be stupid enough to put all your eggs in one basket regardless of how upper management try to force you, thou must make them repent their sins for the BOFH knows the true path"
Does that also go for on premises servers? Surely all the eggs are in the same basket in that scenario, particularly if that server is an SBS?
"Barracuda is learning to swim in the cloud sea. Hughes is an on-premises doom-and-gloom man but he smiles when he looks up to the clouds. That’s the future and it’s bright."
Hughes is a salesman..."the company’s EVP for worldwide sales" to be specific. The future might be bright *for him* if he can punt kit to cloud sellers; but that doesn't necessarily apply to anyone else.
It all sounds nice, no IT demands, everything looked after for you. Just get on with your business and no need to worry.
Until, of course, it changes. New software not working as you want? Tough shit. Data not available? Might come back, otherwise tough shit as the SLA has no mention of compensation for *your* loss due to our fsck-up. Service down today and you have a deadline for tomorrow? Tough shit, get in line with 2 million other users who are kicking up a fuss and maybe we will get back to you.
Sure your own IT dept might do the same, but at least they are in reach of the cattle prod...
Yep, it's all (in theory) about accountability. If your internal solution breaks, it goes up the chain to the CIO/CTO. If Google stops working, you think Google cares? Your CIO/CTO is going to be on the phone (if you're lucky) with a technical representative in India. Google's worth a lot more than your company and they don't have time to care.
And Microsoft? Name one decision under the Balmer regime that was about customer service or choice? It will be hard to shake that much history off just because Microsoft is rebranding itself as a SaaS/PaaS company.
" The pace of innovation in these two clouds is mind-blowing,"
Yes, it is. And highly annoying, too. Some of us just want the stuff to work consistently.
I mean, I like Office365 for email for students and employees - saves me having to maintain a fleet of local email servers. But after a while, it gets numbing to keep up with which features are changing this quarter, what new features (that we don't know how to admin yet, but the lusers will want to use the day after they come out) are coming out, what useful features are being taken away, etc?
It's like building a huge mansion on sand - sure the mansion as a whole is still up and mostly functional if you don't look too closely, but walls sometimes collapse, floors crack, and doors get stuck. So you repair them and just wait for the next round of problems. So the question becomes - are all these problems (and other things like data ownership/security, availability, etc) worth the benefit of not running our own servers? For email, I'd say YES. For general purpose stuff like SQL or file servers or AD, I'd say NO. That's not the kind of stuff I want to be a moving target dictated by Microsoft's marketing department.
And that's probably why Barracuda is in a hurt now - they built their business taking care of peripheral stuff - email filtering, backup, firewalling- most of which is fairly easy to move to the cloud, and even easier to justify to Upper Management of why it was moved to the cloud (especially when MS is giving it to education customers for FREE). I feel sorry for them - I always liked their products back when we used them.
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