We Are All Cloud Users

At a consulting firm I was at a few years ago, the owners of the company were dead set against using the cloud for deploying our applications. They wanted our apps hosted in what they called our mini data center which literally was a closet in our office space that had some extra air conditioning.

“We just don’t use they cloud here,” one of the owners said. In my mind I fantasized about standing up in that meeting and pointing at the owners and yelling liar liar pants on fire. I didn’t because I wanted to continue to be able to continue feeding my family, but that meeting was ironic.

The irony is that as we are having that meeting, the owners were using the smart phones to check their corporate Gmail accounts. So right in that meeting they were using the cloud and telling me that I couldn’t use it for my client’s projects. Hypocrites!

In their defense, they remember the old mainframe days were distributed computing was no fun at all, and they never wanted to go back to that. I don’t blame them because what little main frame work I’ve done during my career was very painful and frustrating.

This experience does bring up a point though – cloud computing does touch our everyday lives. Whether it’s sending a text to watching Netflix or browsing Facebook, we as private citizens are using the cloud every day. We’ve come to accept these tools that don’t run on our PC as part of our daily lives. Now corporations are moving in this direction as well.

My old company and several others are concerned about security, and feel more secure with being able to walk down the hall and see the servers working away in that air-conditioned closet. But who do you trust more: your IT guy that looks at your IT security every once in a while or a provider like Google that has a team of engineers constantly monitoring its systems looking for security issues. In fact, Google has some of the best security specialists in the world.

A final word about your company moving to the cloud if your still hesitant. The CIA utilizes a huge cloud application that resides within Amazon Web Service, if they can do it so can you.