What's new

Fear and Loathing of the Cloud - Part 2

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

"Cloud Stuff" can certainly be cheaper. I see it every day as we phase-out/replace big old fire breathing furnace servers....and replace them with cloud based servers, for small to medium businesses. When you add up the *cost for hardware...servers, plus *cost for server licenses, plus *cost for battery backup, plus *cost for backup/disaster recovery, plus *cost for IT to maintain the servers, plus *cost to refresh the server hardware every 3-5 years, plus *cost of electricity of running those big furnace servers, plus *cost for cooling the server room..maintaining a 65* temp, plus....<the list goes on..and on..but this covers "some" of the big factors.

...versus, a cloud based subscription model.

Of the past couple of years, I've migrated a LOT of businesses from full local servers, to hybrid setups w/cloud and smaller local servers, to 100% cloud...and all sorts of combinations in between.

I actually miss the HUGE profits we made from server installs and server migrations and server replacements. Making fat profit on the sale of 5 and 10 and 15 thousand dollar servers....plus another 5 or 10 or 20 grand and sometimes more in labor charges. Oh yeah....we ate thick juicy steaks and drank expensive wine all the time back in those days.

And then a few years ago, this "cloud" thing came in. Microsoft replace Small Business Server (a big part of our bread and butter) with hybrids of local servers and Office 365...or all O365. I panicked at all the money we'd lose...not only from the initial sale of servers and migrations, but all the fat recurring revenue too....our e-mail filtering for local Exchange servers, our monthly maintenance (MSP) fees for maintaining servers...monitoring, updates, etc. "The Cloud" stuff was taking all of that away! I feared having to eat 99cent Raman Pride noodle soup every night instead of 2.5" thick New York Strip steak and expensive wine or bottls of Guinness!

...but like Clint Eastwood said in one of his little know movies Heartbreak Ridge..."Adapt and Overcome!"
and we did. We jumped on the Microsoft CSP program and through volumes of O365 sales...have some steady monthly coming in, and of course other MSP things have grown. We're starting to at least eat a steak a month or sometimes two steaks a month again.

Savings....to the clients, yes...I see them all the time. Smaller monthly payments versus a huge initial purchase, and then monthly maintenance, and then hardware refreshments every 3-5 years with a huge initial cost again...repeat cycle..repeat cycle. Not to mention savings on much less invested in disaster recovery. And that can lead to savings in cyber insurance too.

IT Consulting/services/support is what I do for a living, for...nearly 20 years now.
As for "security" of data.....sure, if some people select some fly by night cloud host...yeah, there is a slight worry they can pack up in the middle of the night and relocate to south america and you'll never see your data again. But...I prefer to say...do you homework, select legit, solid companies to host your data at.

...and more importantly regarding data...you do realize that the vast majority of residential users have insecure home networks, and a large percentage of those are infested with botnets and trojans. Pretty much the same goes for businesses, I'd wager that >50% of business networks are rife with trojans and bots.....quietly taking their "data". The good trojans and bots aren't detected. Only the poorly written ones are. And we don't even have to talk about ransomware....holy cow is that stuff exploding all over. Can't tell you how many situations I've seen where servers tanked, or ransomware hit, or malware hit...and compromised data..and the client had no good, monitored backup. Yeah..."Whoops!!!"

Cloud based biz networks take away much of that worry.


Agree with everything you say about cloud based solutions for small to medium sized businesses. I said as much myself in this very thread (though not as eloquently!).

This doesn't change the fact that for consumers, the costs will spiral out of control if they let them with a nickel and diming policy of ever increasing prices for what was a one time purchase in the past.

Note that what you and I consider as small business is relative. If any small mom and pop operation needed $50K every year or two (or three) to run their business in IT service c0sts alone, we'd be in perfect agreement.

But thankfully, they don't.

And thanks for the tip to the Eastwood movie. I'll have to check it out. :)
 

Latest threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top