I don't think most admins are worried about losing their job, I think they are worried about cloud services going down or disappearing and having nothing they can do about it, let alone information security and other factors.
Yes, there are concerns about reliability on a day-to-day level, as well as the question of "Will this service be around in 3 years?" And related: "How much money are we going to spend transitioning to a service that might not be around in 3 years, and then how much money will we spend transitioning off if it goes away or we don't like it?"
But there are more problems than that: in some contexts, the "Cloud" services just aren't as good. If my "network" is made up of a bunch of laptops traveling throughout the country, then a "cloud" file sharing service like Dropbox might be very handy. If, however, my network is a LAN with a bunch of workstations hard-lined into it, and I have 5 TB of files stored on a file server, then moving that file server to Dropbox might not offer any improvement at all. If I'm managing those workstations with a Windows domain to provide group policies and single sign-on, there isn't a cloud service that I'm aware of that provides the same functionality as simply and elegantly. You also have to consider which model serves users better when the Internet is down or slow. If everything is on the Internet, then when the Internet goes out, your business is shut down.
So I don't know who Curtis Peterson is, when people start talking derisively about the use of local servers, I usually guess that they've never done real IT work. There are still a lot of situations where you need too much control, too much security, and too much bandwidth to push it all offsite-- regardless of whether you call it "the cloud" or "a hosted server" or "a collocated server". As an IT guy, I'd love to move everything to "the cloud", but it's not ready. And it won't be ready until we (a) have ubiquitous, high speed, highly reliable Internet everywhere; and (b) the "cloud" becomes more built on open formats, APIs and protocols rather than having a bunch of big businesses pushing us into little walled gardens.
Wrong concern (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think most admins are worried about losing their job, I think they are worried about cloud services going down or disappearing and having nothing they can do about it, let alone information security and other factors.
Re:Wrong concern (Score:3)
Yes, there are concerns about reliability on a day-to-day level, as well as the question of "Will this service be around in 3 years?" And related: "How much money are we going to spend transitioning to a service that might not be around in 3 years, and then how much money will we spend transitioning off if it goes away or we don't like it?"
But there are more problems than that: in some contexts, the "Cloud" services just aren't as good. If my "network" is made up of a bunch of laptops traveling throughout the country, then a "cloud" file sharing service like Dropbox might be very handy. If, however, my network is a LAN with a bunch of workstations hard-lined into it, and I have 5 TB of files stored on a file server, then moving that file server to Dropbox might not offer any improvement at all. If I'm managing those workstations with a Windows domain to provide group policies and single sign-on, there isn't a cloud service that I'm aware of that provides the same functionality as simply and elegantly. You also have to consider which model serves users better when the Internet is down or slow. If everything is on the Internet, then when the Internet goes out, your business is shut down.
So I don't know who Curtis Peterson is, when people start talking derisively about the use of local servers, I usually guess that they've never done real IT work. There are still a lot of situations where you need too much control, too much security, and too much bandwidth to push it all offsite-- regardless of whether you call it "the cloud" or "a hosted server" or "a collocated server". As an IT guy, I'd love to move everything to "the cloud", but it's not ready. And it won't be ready until we (a) have ubiquitous, high speed, highly reliable Internet everywhere; and (b) the "cloud" becomes more built on open formats, APIs and protocols rather than having a bunch of big businesses pushing us into little walled gardens.