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Official Doc Reveals Oracle's Cloud Rules
itwbennett writes "In an official document that is both 'confidential' and publicly available on Oracle's website, the company lays out its cloud policies. Most of the policies follow industry standards, but then there are a few that should give customers pause. Like the one that allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute or account violation."
It's not your cloud. You inherently have to play by their rules.
that was fast
Like the one that allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute or account violation.
OMG you mean they can disable my service if I violate their usage terms or fail to pay them? What an outrageous policy!
Bad Link, Bad Slashdot!
That works out to 3 1/2 hours downtime a week, and that's before adding allowances for the "unplanned events" that TFA says Oracle has explicitly exempted from the calculation.
Not available anymore..
The link to the pdf returns a 404..
Like the one that allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute or account violation.
So if you violate the ToS they cut off your access to service? Yeah, and? I can find you hundreds of sites that have similar terms.
How is that any different from Slashdot's own terms?
By using the Sites, you warrant to Dice that you will not use the Sites, or any of the content obtained from the Sites, for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these Terms. If you violate any of these Terms, your permission to use the Sites automatically terminates.
Thats completely standard. If you run any kind of hosting service, you really need the ability to turn your customer's off at a second's notice - a customer can screw up a *lot* in an extremely short period of time. You can destroy an ip's spam reputation, crash servers, use nearly infinite numbers of resources, be DoSing paypal, or be the hole through which hordes of barbarian invaders are thundering through in mass, and all in just minutes.
Oracle's cloud rules!
The official doc reveals it.
We host services. My boss jokingly refers to the ability of disabling servers on delinquent accounts as the "Pay me" button. And it works too. :)
Having been on the other side of this policy, I'd have to disagree with your sentiment. It's cloud services... So they have you by the short hairs. When the renewal comes up and they CHANGE the contract... as a customer you really only have one weapon, and that's to withhold the check. "We're not paying you until this contract isn't screwing us" and they they use this clause... "We're going to shut off your service if you don't agree to these new terms and pay up" And I'm not talking about withholding the pay for the service you have right now. Usually these contracts are signed in October or so for the following year... and they will threaten to turn off your service NOW if you don't agree and abide by their new "offer" for next year. They argue that you must draw up terms of disconnection or sign a new deal... if you fail to do either you're in violation of their agreement because you need to give proper notice... Oracles a bitch when it comes to contracts.
Dumb ass, here's a clue for you. Don't put you and your company is a position vulnerability in the first place and you won't have to worry.
why anyone would put anything critical in Oracle's hands is beyond me
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
It's like any other service except it uses the word "cloud". Oracle isn't any different in this particular regard than any other cloud provider.
Dumb ass, here's a clue for you. Don't put you and your company is a position vulnerability in the first place and you won't have to worry.
How do you have an internet presence without putting yourself in the hands of some provider that can cut you off if you don't pay?
Unless you build your own datacenter in your own building (not leased). have your own power plant (wouldn't want the power company to be able to cut you off), have multiple internet connections from different carriers, how can you avoid being beholden to another company's terms of use?
Come on, this is standard for any host provider. It's CYA 101.
Dumb ass, here's a clue for you. Don't put you and your company is a position vulnerability in the first place and you won't have to worry.
HA!
Spoken as someone who has never had a cost accountant and or/addition to a PHB up your ass about wasting money, needing business cases for every action/reaction, and following trends on the latest cost saving measures, or even worse listens to their sales people FIRST and then dictating to you what needs to be done without hearing your input.
If the initial and I may say illegal initial bait and switch shows cost savings they will sell their soul to get it done!
Now 3 months later after you fire half your IT team and get rid of all but 3 servers and Oracle raises rates by 350% what are you going to do? Say I told you so? No you will be fired for making your bosses boss look bad.
http://saveie6.com/
Unless you build your own datacenter in your own building (not leased). have your own power plant (wouldn't want the power company to be able to cut you off), have multiple internet connections from different carriers, how can you avoid being beholden to another company's terms of use?
Keep your code and your data backed up somewhere you have access to them. When somebody tries to screw you over with a dodgy contract, commission the necessary hardware from somewhere else and deploy your code. Cutover to the new system, and tell your old provider to go to hell.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I'm an infrastructure architect. My rule is no oracle unless you can prove to me you really need it and there's no alternative. Oracle always tries to screw you over with their licensing and their pricing.
It's called the warm fuzzy. I think the problem really boils down to who do the people making the final decisions really listen to.
Dumb ass, here's a clue for you. Don't put you and your company is a position vulnerability in the first place and you won't have to worry.
HA!
Spoken as someone who has never had a cost accountant and or/addition to a PHB up your ass about wasting money, needing business cases for every action/reaction, and following trends on the latest cost saving measures, or even worse listens to their sales people FIRST and then dictating to you what needs to be done without hearing your input.
Truth be told, lots of business people are already feeling like they are being held hostage by their own IT group and running to Whatever-As-A-Service is like The Great Escape for them. To them IT is like power and fedex, they just want it done and they don't see a reason to keep that cost center in-house.
The fact that business users require business cases shows that they are being rational and don't fall easily for the latest gimmick. It's a good thing. What is not good is feeling threatened by this approach instead of using that opportunity to streamline the internal IT offering. (And this just between us, your point about Oracle raising rates by 350% is FUD - it's not a nice mode to fallback on as experienced business users will smell it from a mile away).
The cloud providers are just getting started; they have nice brochures, case studies and satisfied customers to call upon. If you think the internal IT department is a better option for the business it's up to you to make your point; you even have the benefit of being the incumbent. And if you don't like that culture, quit and send your resume to Oracle, they'll need people to maintain the servers where your former employer is moving all their stuff like everyone else.
lucm, indeed.
why anyone would put anything critical in Oracle's hands is beyond me
And where exactly would you rather put it? for your convenience here is an overview of the main database cloud offerings:
1) Oracle
2) Microsoft SQL Azure
3) EnterpriseDB (Postgresql)
4) Amazon RDS (MySQL)
5) A bunch of NoSQL providers (like MongoLab)
Granted, Oracle has the worst SLA in all these offerings but until IBM comes out with a DB2 Cloud service, Oracle is still ranked near or at the the top of that list. And anyways if you read the fine prints in any of those SLAs you'll see that the penalty for downtime is peanuts, like it is almost always the case in IT [1]; the real question is who you trust the most, not who puts the most 9s in their ads.
It's easy to bash a product without coming up with a relevant alternative. Let's see what you propose.
[1] One exception: high-end Hitachi SANs that come with a 100% uptime SLA by contract - a terrific peace of mind if you don't mind the hefty price tag.
lucm, indeed.
What I don't get is why there is a demand for the "cloud" anyway. Storage has never been cheaper, and internet access never more pervasive. If you can't store your data on your multi-gigabyte devices and move it to your other multi-gigabyte devices yourself through your internet provider, there's something wrong somewhere.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Try and build your system distributed so that you can use multiple different cloud providers in different countries at the same time.
Also build (or rent) your own data centre to handle the continuous capacity which your application is handling, only use the cloud for the variable capacity, owning your own computers is still cheaper if you can load them 100% throughout their life.
I am currently building such a system, hopefully it will work.
So... exactly what every other company out there does but they're telling you this right up front. BURN THE WITCHES!
We're sorry, the page you requested was not found ??? link not found
AccountKiller
I'm no fan of Oracle, but I've been in exactly this position: a dispute over a change of contract terms (to the tune of about $10K). They continued to honour the existing contract whilst it was in dispute, and eventually (a year later!) agreed to retrospectively change the contract in my favour. Yes they are a money-grabbing corporation, but they can afford to take the long view, and alienating customers doesn't work in the long term.
They must have an offer you can't refuse.
And in the time when you're without service? Let's say Oracle offers you a new contract, and you say no. They then cut your service the next day, since you're in a contract 'dispute'. Sure you can buy the necessary hardware then, but it will still mean a downtime of at least a few days.
In an age where (big) data has become recognized as the most valuable aspect of modern society, why anyone would give their data to someone else and pay them to keep it is beyond me.
#1: You do not talk about ORACLE CLOUD
#2: You DO NOT talk about ORACLE CLOUD
#3: If someone says "DROP TABLE", goes local storage or rains out, the cloud is over
#4: Only two-bit keys in a cloud
#5: One cloud to rule them all
#6: No backups, no three-factor authentication
#7: The cloud will grow as big as it has to
#8: If this is your first night at ORACLE CLOUD, you HAVE to upload everything
why anyone would put anything critical in Oracle's hands is beyond me
You have no choice when the service you have been using quite happily for the last 10 years is suddenly aquired by Oracle. We got an announcement out of the blue that company X was aquired by Oracle and had to make a choice in a relatively short time on what to do. Turns out that the migration plan would take at least 6 months of work assuming we could find the man power and another vendor to do everything we needed - more weeks of searching - by that time we would be well into the contract and would have to pay a hefty 'fine' to come out of it.
There's a reason you 'host' certain types of data, ironically it was so we in our department could keep control of the way it was handled instead of being 'integrated' into the Sales Tools and therefore be at risk by some 'sales executive' breaking something (as was painfully shown to us when we did intial tests on the potential of using in-house systems), when we asked for certain access levels to be curtailed were told that this was not possible because of XYZ and there was no way we could guarantee the up time, redundancy and scalability of an inhouse, ad-hoc system.
So we are where we are.
At least with a hosted system they have responsibilities and liabilities that we can use if needed. We also have a large customer base that Oracle would not like to piss off if only because of the bad PR. I am also skeptical that contracts like this apply the same across the whole world, try some of the shenannigans they can get away with in the USA in Europe and you soon get short shrift (and big fines). The rules are different in different countries within the EU.
Companies do this all the time, it's not a big suprise and when you get to enterprise level support you cannot just 'switch' at will, at least not quickly and not without affecting your current base and incurring massive cost, no matter if you hate the company that now hosts your data.
If we're going to make up ridiculous hypothetical situations, what happens if a seventh portal to hell opens up inside the data center and Larry Ellison is revealed to be an alien named P'thang, who insists that you deliver your first born so that he may devour it?
Some things are more likely to happen than others. Both your & my scenario are as likely to happen as each other.
Works great as long as you trust them to be 100% honest and fair. If they try to screw you, you have no recourse; you're out of business as soon as you object to anything they do. Maybe you'll get a little money back once your case makes it through the courts.
Oh, wait, did I say through the courts? No, there's probably a mandatory arbitration clause anyway. But you'll still be out of business until you get in front of this theoretically-neutral arbiter.
have your own power plant
Pffft. We have a generator attached to our own oil well and refinery. We also have our own military to ensure a secure supply to the local creek for frack water. Our employees all parachute into work in case of local road disruption, and we have an entirely redundant site 30 miles underground, attached to a fully redundant fiber network.
I've said too much.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wow... way to spout nonsense without having any corporate IT experience what-so-ever. I don't have the power to decide if we use their service or not. I am the lead admin for a SINGLE service we have with them so I get to sit in on the meetings. We have dozens of services with oracle. The service I support is far more than just a database. It's used in-house by over 130 different departments and has been built up and refined over the past 10 years. Moving from it, to something else would be an enormous effort. We started the process over a year ago when I became the lead as I saw this as a huge problem. Oracle can see what we're doing, and they know how corporate environments work so they are putting the screws to us. If we lost the service it wouldn't put us out of business by any means, but it would suck pretty badly for a while.
If I were the king of the business I worked for and got to make all of the decisions with an unlimited budget, we'd be using 100% open source or things written in-house all hosted at our own data center. (yes we have our own, very large, data center) But I'm not the king and our budget is not unlimited. Instead we are held hostage by choices made by people that don't even work there anymore.
When the renewal comes up and they CHANGE the contract...
Oracle: Pray I don't alter it any further...
There's also the "unspoken option" - hire mercenaries to put guns to the heads of the douchebags family. It's amazing the cooperation you get then.
If you are too cheap to have a datacenter (not a derrogatory term mind you, it may just mean that you are small), you create (and test, often) a fast exit from the cloud provider. You should have the phone of your provider's competitors in hand and you must have a copy of your data at your own hands at all times. Also, you should not use proprietary APIs.
Of course, nobody using Oracle's cloud service will have an exit plan. Oracle selects those people as their clients when they make their APIs proprietary... Well, all I can say is that if you are too stupid to make yourself hostage of a corporation, you'll get what you deserve.
Rethinking email
Your timing is wrong. The correct ordering is the following:
1 - Oracle offers your a new contract.
2 - You deploy your code at a new provider and switch to it.
3 - You say "no" to Oracle's contract.
Or, if you have no other option, but reply to Oracle at the same moment they ask, you suffer a loss while you change providers, and cancel the contract at the first opportunity.
Rethinking email
So, if you don't like any of those options, you don't go to a mainstream option! What a surprize, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of companies providing database access, there must be one that fits your requirements.
But, why are you looking for database offerings again? If you are small, a VPS or a rented server will probably fit your needs better. If you are big, there is no excuse from taking care of your own data.
Rethinking email
When you switch to salesforce.com you are then a hostage if you fire IT and and get rid of your servers. THey can do whatever the hell they want including charging more money.
IT is yours and if they are not on your side it is because of accounting bossing them and telling them they are lazy cost centers and not doing their job. WHen you go cheap with IT they then get in the way because they are underfunded and under control by someone who is not held accountable by their decisions.
I have seen people with Vista with only 512 megs of ram waste 1 hour a day booting up and waiting as the system crawls for every 8 hours a day. Why? They needed a business case to spend $40. I mean COME ON?!
It costs probably $150 in lost wages to find out if htey need the $40. IT is turned down usually as it does not boast the share price. People then get mad at IT.
I never was comfortable with their storage. I thought I'd share with you an interesting online tool I use, they offer a great service. It backs up my music, videos and photos automatically from my computer. Since computers are unpredictable, you can get a virus and all your information and files are gone. This online backup tool protects your files from anything that might happen to your pc and its helps you recover all your important files like your music and photos incase they go missing from your pc. And its free to download. Just click on this link http://goo.gl/ 4mRKK
Or Oracle suspends your account a few days after they offer you your new contract, if they decide to treat your silence as a dispute.
Oracle appears to have yanked it, but you can still pull it up via Google's cache:
https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2Fus%2Fcorporate%2Fcontracts%2Fcloud-hosting-delivery-policies-1881437.pdf
In a few days you should be somewhere else already, even if it is an expensive short term contract. (Of course, that if it is cheaper than just acepting the new contract, to cancel it later.)
Rethinking email
So, if you have to always be ready to change providers with a few days notice and have the people to manage that shift, what's the point of even using the cloud? For the same cost you could run your own machines and IT department.
Defining a company by "big" or "small" is a sure way to make a bad decision. Here is an example;
Company A is in the manufacturing industry and has over 5,000 employees. Every week they must process terabytes of data extracted from their production line machines in order to keep a lean inventory and lay off or hire people as needed. They are in a cut-throat industry and can't afford a huge ERP rollout and their shoestring IT budget merely allows for a bunch of commodity servers.
Company B is a hedge fund that has 35 employees and 50 billions in assets under management. Their management fees alone provides them with basically unlimited funds for IT.
Company C is a real-estate firm that has 150 employees. They have a 15-people IT group that does everything from replacing inkjet cartridges to patching the Oracle databases.
Now which one is a "big" company and which one is a "small" one? The entire payroll and yearly expenditures from Company A and C is less than 3% of the profits made by Company B on an average year. The entire staff from Company B is smaller than the night shift team in charge of emptying recycle bins at Company A. Etc.
If you take a quick look at the actual needs from those companies, you will see that:
-Company A can't afford a cloud provider or even licenses on local machines, their best bet is a bunch of commodity servers (or glorified workstations) running something like Hadoop/Hbase (and at least the cool factor keeps the poorly paid IT staff some incentive to stay for a while)
-Company B can't afford downtime and they are worth more than many cloud providers so they would never let a byte stored on someone else's computer; plus the VP probably has a kick giving a hard-on to IT vendors and sysadmin candidates with his "money is no object for our IT infrastructure" speech and that alone seals the deal
-For Company C IT is a cost center and they don't have the volume to justify highly-skilled experts in database or servers management, so their best bet is to put all their stuff in a cloud where there is no lock-in or contract (such as AWS or Azure) and keep a skeleton crew to reset passwords and remove spyware from laptops.
Now take the yellow pages or drive around downtown and see how many companies you can compare to A, B or C, and you will see why there is a future for cloud providers.
lucm, indeed.
If you are not able to change providers* with a few days notice, the cloud is not a safe place for you. There is nothing to arguee about that, just stay out of it.
But you are wrong. It may be still cheaper than doing it yourself, depending on your size. That's the point.
* Without any kind of support from your current provider.
Rethinking email
I have seen people with Vista with only 512 megs of ram waste 1 hour a day booting up and waiting as the system crawls for every 8 hours a day. Why? They needed a business case to spend $40. I mean COME ON?!
It costs probably $150 in lost wages to find out if htey need the $40. IT is turned down usually as it does not boast the share price. People then get mad at IT.
The TOGAF model is divided in 4 equally important areas: Business, Applications, Data and Technology. The situation you describe is typical in organizations where the Enterprise Architecture team is weak or does not cover properly the four areas. Technology is often the black sheep.
Business cases cannot be done at the unit level; they are a strategic asset that should guide and shape IT policies. In the RAM example it would be quite easy to demonstrate in actual numbers that with the cost of RAM, providing everyone with at least 8GB is cost-effective; once an executive has seen this business case they will update the IT policy to either automatically give those 8GB to everyone or deny it and accept the consequences on productivity - but one way or the other once a decision is made there is no need for yet another business case each time a new laptop is to be upgraded.
It is not unrealistic to build a good EA team who can spin decent business cases to PHBs and solve that kind of problems. However in my experience the biggest resistance does not come from the executive level (those who sign or decline actual business cases) but from IT middle management where people tend to be penny wise and pound foolish (spending $40 on RAM for a laptop is insane, but spending 20% more on HP server hardware versus identical Dell server hardware is ok because HP is "better").
lucm, indeed.
I call BS. If you have a contract NOW (and you're not late on your payments), they cannot turn it off because you won't sign a contract for next year. You're just making stuff up.
All your examples have a lot to lose, and too little to gain from relying on the cloud.
The cloud is a great fit for for Company D, that is a sole founder that sells services for companies A, B and C. It needs some web presence, so clients will find it, but surely can't afford even to own its own servers (won't even think about owning a HA setup).
Rethinking email
You have to take off your IT hat and think about it from a business perspective. A cost center like IT is a nightmare from an accounting perspective because it puts a lot of weight in the capital expenditure column (while cloud hosting is a operational expenditure, which is much easier to swallow).
Have a quick read on this topic:
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/whitepaper/getting-on-the-right-side-of-the-capex-vs-opex-divide
(disclaimer: it's from a company that offers cloud hosting)
Now if you take actual numbers (from Azure but you can get equivalent with a mix of AWS and Google):
-hosting a 10GB SQL Server database on Azure: $50/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included)
-add up to 10 web apps: $100/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included)
-add a service bus with 10 million messages a month: $10/month
-add two Windows VM to run those weird proprietary apps that can't go web: $20/month
You are now facing a $180/month bill for a 3-site redundant infrastructure that gives a 99.9% uptime SLA (that's Azure, other may vary) that is absolutely not dependant on the local staff vacation schedule. Over 3 years this means a bit under $7k for machines you don't have to buy, power, cool down and maintain (except for patching those 2 VMs). A single physical server will cost more than that (many times if it's running Windows and SQL Server) and there is no way you can get a 99.9% uptime with a single server that you have to patch, maintain, etc. and that may end up offline a few days if the RAID controller goes bad and the battery is backorder.
Now let's run numbers for office stuff (email, groupware, etc);
-Exchange online is $4/user/month (max 25GB inbox). For the 150 employees in Company C, this means about 7k$ a year.
-Full online services (unlimited email, archiving, voicemail integration, SharePoint, etc) is $20/user/month. this means about $35k a year.
(again - same is available from other providers like Google)
So the total for a full cloud scenario with unlimited email and no need for hardware/backup/maintenance/monitoring is around $40k/year. At Company C their current IT staff alone cost them about 10-15 times that; if by hosting their applications, databases and emails in the cloud they can get rid of 1-2 dudes they are in the black. Plus savings on hardware, power, cooling, licenses and whatnot. And guess what, with fully monitored and maintained cloud services, Company C could probably live with a very small IT group.
As for SLAs: when you have a 15-person staff, with vacation, sick days and variable skill set you cannot expect to have the same availability as a well-staffed, established cloud provider. Volume speaks.
So spin this any way you want, the cloud is a good scenario for Company C (and there are a lot of them out there).
lucm, indeed.
I lost my IT hat a few years ago. Altough nowadays I'm kind of back on IT, that hat still don't fit.
The division of activities in cost centers and revenue centers is bullshit. If you have an activity that won't improve your botton line (risks included), you just stop doing it. If you are doing it and claiming that it doesn't either increase revenues or reduce costs, you are either stupid or lying.
Also, accounting perspective is miopic. That's why accounting is a department, not a C-level position.
But enough with introductoy material. Let's get to the cloud.
Of course, that's not all. Otherwise all that conversation about changing providers wouldn't have happened. But, yes, that's all an acountant would see.
And how much will it cost if their cloud provider simply took their data offline and closed doors? Yes, keeping your services on site is more expensive (and needs a bigger up-front investiment) than using the cloud, except when something happens. And something always happens.
What, you can't schedule 15 people so they'll be able to keep the basics working at all times? I'd agree if you said 3... 4 would be really pushing it, but 15!?
Rethinking email
Also, accounting perspective is miopic. That's why accounting is a department, not a C-level position.
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in my experience when there are C-level positions the first one to be created after CEO is CFO. And in most organizations the CFO has more power than the CIO/CTO (if there is even one - in many organizations IT is directly reporting to the CFO). I could provide you with links about the growing power of CFOs in IT but I'm sure your Google works just fine.
Obviously with such a disconnect between our individual experiences we will never see eye-to-eye.
Also so far my experience with cloud providers (mostly Azure+Office365, some AWS) has been terrific and every setup I've done includes a backup or sync on a different provider (or locally) so the actual risk of getting locked out is inexistant, and for most organizations I've worked with the risk of having a major cloud disruption versus the risk of a major production incident with the local infrastructure makes the cloud very attractive. Which is why I suspect that you don't have a different experience with cloud providers (if any experience at all) but merely a preconceived idea.
lucm, indeed.
Unless you build your own datacenter in your own building (not leased). have your own power plant (wouldn't want the power company to be able to cut you off), have multiple internet connections from different carriers, how can you avoid being beholden to another company's terms of use?
Keep your code and your data backed up somewhere you have access to them. When somebody tries to screw you over with a dodgy contract, commission the necessary hardware from somewhere else and deploy your code. Cutover to the new system, and tell your old provider to go to hell.
==
theory is great. but often the transition from one provider to another can take months of planning, and reconfiguration and implementation. Do you think that you should put the lifeblood of your business on the web with a provider who can unilaterally shut your business down?