Don’t let the naysayers rain on cloud computing

If software vendors such as Microsoft are looking toward cloud computing as the future of the industry, they are setting themselves up

for pain, concludes Gregory Ness on the Seeking Alpha blog. He whines about a whole list of factors that make cloud computing an impractical option today and maybe forever. His reasons begin with the fact that DNS has been proven to be vulnerable to attack and difficult to patch. That must mean, he argues, that if you shift your applications into the cloud, you’ll also be handing hackers the means to own you, if not through these flaws then through your run-of-the-mill storm clouds.

He also contends that savings to users won’t be that great because the total cost of ownership of servers has little to do with the cost of the hardware itself. Administration costs are the real killer. In theory, when a user hires a cloud computing vendor, the user is shedding admin costs to the SaaS provider. But in practice sooner-or-later high admin costs will be passed along. He also says that when shifting hardware from a highly distributed architecture (each company owning its own) to a highly centralized model (the mega data center in the cloud), that power consumption and the environmental impact might actually be worse if the data center owner doesn’t know how to effectively virtualize and manage all of those boxes.

All of these drawbacks are right on the money, but none of them negate the long-term viability of cloud computing. The software industry is already finding ways to compensate. Microsoft’s amazing container model for building data centers shows how creativity can solve energy and scalability problems. High powered PCs will run virtualized versions of software that can be operated locally if a connection fails and then synch with the cloud when the connection returns. (This is one of the cornerstone’s of Microsoft’s “software-plus-services” strategy.) DNS hacking will be less successful when there are less targets. And as for the high costs of administration — centralization nearly always reduces administrative costs. As cloud computing increases, so will the cloud provider’s skill in managing its resources for maximum profitability. 

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