Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video)
Curtis Peterson says admins who hang onto their servers instead of moving into the cloud are 'Server Huggers,' a term he makes sound like 'Horse Huggers,' a phrase that once might have been used to describe hackney drivers who didn't want to give up their horse-pulled carriages in favor of gasoline-powered automobiles. Curtis is VP of Operations for RingCentral, a cloud-based VOIP company, so he's obviously made the jump to the cloud himself. And he has reassuring words for sysadmins who are afraid the move to cloud-based computing is going to throw them out of work. He says there are plenty of new cloud computing opportunities springing up for those who have enough initiative and savvy to grab onto them, by which he obviously means you, right?
Isn't the "cloud" just a bunch of servers? Should nobody be hugging THOSE servers either?
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
It's cheap in the short run, especially if you can't afford the hardware. That's why people used to lease time on IBM mainframes in computer centres. Now people lease time on x86s in computer centres, not realizing that buying enough for your base load is affordable, as well as cheaper in the long run.
The leasing (cloud) people just love people who don't know about costs.
davecb@spamcop.net
And my reading of many cloud services break many privacy laws. The service provider can see/use the data too. Oops, SOX compliance out the window. Save one critical email to the cloud, and you are breaking the law. Customer data in the cloud? Privacy laws broken. Student or medical info in the cloud? More laws broken. Where are the SOX compliance statements from the cloud?
I've seen none that promise legal indemnity for any data stored on their cloud.
Until they offer that, I'll hug my server, rather than get fined or sent to prison (yeah, nobody goes to prison for something like that, but it's theoretically possible) .
Learn to love Alaska
I worked around the PHB doing something like this by telling him we'd written our own cloud software and were using it because it was more secure than what is currently available.
He doesn't talk to cloud guys, because we've already got a cloud provider (AFAHKT).
Yes, things like this really work in real life.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.