Who knows what to expect of Microsoft anymore. When a huge company like them who can afford to hire the best and brightest releases something like Windows 8, which more or less is an OS that belongs on a smartphone or a tablet, and expect it to be widely adopted on desktops, you can’t underestimate the level of ‘stupid’ they’re capable of.
Seems their future direction is going to be oriented toward “The Cloud”(God I hate that term). All a great concept, as long as a company runs and manages their own private “Cloud”. Of course from a financial point of view, a private cloud undercuts the reason for using “the cloud” in the first place, because they can’t outsource their IT staff, which is suicidal IMO. Only a moron(or MBA) would hand over all of their company’s data and infrastructure to a 3rd party that could be on the other side of the world with the goal of saving a few dollars.
Not necessarily true. I'm in the middle of architecting and building a hybrid-cloud solution for my employer (large bank) with the goal being using the public cloud for burstable processing power. That means having our private cloud defined and implemented well enough that we can call public cloud services to process data for us, while retaining the data in-house.
From the discussions I've had with other large organizations (banks, manufacturing, retail, other large financial services firms) I'm not hearing ANYONE who's moving their Data to the cloud. The recent revelations about the NSA have largely put a stop to that. Security concerns around hackers, DDOS attacks etc.. preventing a company from accessing their data in the cloud are also key stopping points.
because they can’t outsource their IT staff, which is suicidal IMO.
The intent of Cloud Computing (let's face it, "Cloud is a term for "internet based" or "ASP's" as they were known 5-10 years ago) is less about outsourcing and more about finding new ways to increase data processing capabilities in the most efficient manner possible.
"Most efficient" doesn't mean less staff, it means more automation to reduce manual work allowing employees to focus on more strategic types of work. Pushing that management speak aside, "getting there" to "Cloud Computing" whether private, public or hybrid cloud solutions happens to be a very labor intensive effort. Anyone "moving to the cloud" is not cutting employees -- they're adding.
Only a moron(or MBA) would hand over all of their company’s data and infrastructure to a 3rd party that could be on the other side of the world with the goal of saving a few dollars.
It doesn't take an MBA to know that the above statement is 100% correct!! Recent revelations about the NSA really are rocking the financial services industry right now. NO ONE wants their client's personally identifiable information to be exposed to the NSA or hackers -- period. Any company's ability to protect their data is only as good as their ability to protect it. Turning a client's personal data and financial information over to a third-party in our organization (I work for a wealth management financial services company & large multinational bank) is literally giving over the keys to the kingdom. Ain't gonna happen and if we did, we'd need our clients permission first. If we were to simply outsource their data to a third-party without their consent or knowledge, should they find out about it we'd hemmorage customers and be out of business faster than I care to think about it.