[so_real]

The formula "security = 1 / convenience" is a formula I can understand. What I don't understand is what the advantages are to moving an organization's date "to the cloud" where hands unknown have access to it. I've heard people say "you don't have to invest in bandwidth or the knowledge base to maintain the systems". But that seems more like an excuse to be "dumb and lazy" as a company at the risk of leaking company information. Why the push to centralize to cloud locations rather than remaining distributed?

[JRandomFreeper]

Got me. I have no clue why handing over the crown jewels of any company to some 'cloud' seems to make sense to some management types.

I expect to see some pretty bloody reprisals after the first multi-million dollar loss of data in the 'cloud'.

/johnny

[LaserJock]

“Why the push to centralize to cloud locations rather than remaining distributed?”

I’ll claim ignorance here, but I thought “the cloud” was the definition of distributed computing and data management.

Various futurists have been arguing that the value of data is rapidly approaching zero during this age of accelerating change and ubiquitous information access. Put another way, the half life of a good idea is getting shorter and shorter. Business models based on husbanding data as if it has value (the crown jewels) are going to fade away and be replaced by business models built on the concept of exploiting new and publicly available data more rapidly than your peers.

I fear that if these predictions are true, the U.S. government and its love of classified data will fail to compete with faster governments not married to protecting mountains of information or data. Many of our larger businesses could follow suit.

We live in interesting times.

[Reeses]

What I don't understand is what the advantages are to moving an organization's data "to the cloud" where hands unknown have access to it.

Companies increasingly outsource their IT to foreigners so they don't really care. It's all about price. A virtual data center of 100 servers can be created in the cloud in 2 days, while the track record in many IT shops is 2 months to provision a single physical server. The price of cloud computing is amazingly dirt cheap. Eventually companies will move to inhouse or more local cloud infrastructure.

Here's an intro to Amazon web services: http://aws.amazon.com/resources/webinars/

[The Duke]

What I don't understand is what the advantages are to moving an organization's date "to the cloud" where hands unknown have access to it.

The advantage is that it's cool and trendy - kinda like doing performance-sensitive processing with interpreted languages.