This will penetrate all remaining defences against business spionage

[the_tyrant]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Tyrant,

the cloud is located in the US, becasue the servers are. For companies, having their computers remote-controllable from external clouds (=US spies), is no way to go for them. Its like banks having their safe mechanisms controlled by robbers in another country.

Google and MS can claim as much as they want that they do not cooperate with the US intel services. They do, 100% certain, and I take it for certain as well that the US services massively support what the British prime minister demanded from the British GCHQ: to "support business interests of the British industry".

In other words the governmental services are ordered to steal everything from foreign companies that is of value to own companies: financial papers, inventions, blueprints, formulas, development data.

If you store that in the cloud, or you have it in your own companies network - but that network depends on an OS that only exists in the cloud, located in the US - guess in whose hands control of you data ends.

I will run W7 to death, and then disconnect it from the web, and getting a second computer based on Linux and open Gnu-sofdtware and the like. It's clear. I will not increase but reduce my internet dependence and activities.

I'm loosing interest in all that anyway, slowly, but constantly. So it is more a question of timing anyway.

Well first of all, external cloud arrangements are inevitable. Just like any other form of outsourcing, it has its risks, but as far as I see, industrial espionage isn't something that most companies are concerned about.

Hell, apple would never tell you this, but their iCloud runs on Microsoft Azure (Microsoft's Platform as a Service service). And Sony runs many of their major services on Amazon EC2. Shouldn't Apple be more afraid that their direct competitor will steal their intellectual property?

Cloud deployments, just like any other IT decision has to undergo a course of cost benefit analysis, and truth is, if not even Apple is afraid of their no. 1 competitor stealing their interlectual property, I'm not really afraid of Microsoft stealing my Minecraft server on Azure now am I?

The truth is, IT outsourcing has been here since forever. It is simply unrealistic to expect every company to do all their stuff in house.

After all, Subsim is not hosted in Neal's basement, its hosted at a web hosting company somewhere, at some datacenter far, far away from Neal. In fact, from a quick cursory search, I can see that Subsim is in Las Vegas.

Do you trust subsim? Well not totally, I won't discuss my evil schemes with the PM system here, but for its use, I trust subsim enough to use it. Even though yes, in theory the hosting company can go and take all the data off the Subsim server (hell, I even reuse this password with 2 other sites, and I trust Subsim's web host enough that they won't do it).

Public cloud deployments and software as a service will not go away. I firmly believe that it is the future.

Now the question is mostly, find the cloud provider that you trust enough not to steal your data. Would you trust me to run your cloud in my basement? Would you trust me if I ran a cloud service, but had my servers located in a datacenter somewhere else?

But private cloud deployments and self hosted servers will never go away either. Lets just look at the numbers shall we?

Lets look at Microsoft first.

Servers and tools are a 5 Billion + revenue per quarter business. Their whole web business made only 869 million that same quarter.

Why would Microsoft kill off its 5 billion business of selling server software that you run yourself, in an attempt to increase that 869 million? And remember online services includes Bing, Skype, Hotmail, etc. Their public cloud is probably only a fraction of that.

Lets than look at IBM.

IBM is arguably the biggest player in the cloud market. They are huge with their IT services, and is number 1 with private cloud deployments.

Their cloud revenue has topped 1 billion, of which their public cloud accounted for only 460 million. Their total revenue was 23.7 billion. Do you think IBM will kill off their hardware division, their software division, consulting and services division, and their private cloud business to push their public cloud?


As for Red Hat, of their 374 million revenue, barely 20 million of that is from their public cloud!


Amazon's financials are a mess, and is the only company here in my opinion that will kill off their hardware and software products to push their cloud.


As for desktop software in the cloud? Come on Skybird, you are reading an article with no sources, on a product that is like 6 years away or so. Windows 10? They haven't even started to work on windows 9 yet!

I don't believe that it is possible to run a desktop in the cloud before 2020. I have tried it in my local network, and even with Wifi 802.11 n, I cannot get acceptable performance when I access my desktop with my Surface Pro. If it doesn't even work well on my local network, what luck do they have in the cloud?

You know what Skybird, why don't you go and try Microsoft's current "cloud desktop" offering?
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UsingA...udioAzure.aspx

You should be able to get a free trial or something.

Sure, Scott (the guy who wrote that piece I linked up there) can get acceptable performance on Azure. But hey, he's the cloud architect at Microsoft or something, he is sitting minutes away from one of their datacenters, and all he is doing is writing code.

You want to do something that requires a bit more performance on Azure? Impossible, performance at this point is not nearly good enough.