We are on a deadline.
And we always know what happens when we are on a deadline right?
As hard as we try to be prepared ahead of time for any project we are working on there are times where something happens and we are dependent on someone else or some other service to get our jobs done.
As we can see, the service we require is not available. The Intel download site has been temperamental at best this morning when the above finally happened.
Our clients with BlackBerry devices had their fare share of issues this week as well. BlackBerry’s outages are something we are all very aware of as far as their impact worldwide for _days_ at a time.
Risk Analysis
As with any IT Solution we always need to weigh the risks versus the benefits. This is a must-have discussion with business owners.
One of the biggest risks with the Cloud is service outages or local Internet connection outages.
With the number of service interruptions that Microsoft’s online services have experienced along with others we can’t help but draw a comparison to _all_ of the in-house solutions we have deployed over the many years we have been in this business.
The one telling detail in that experience is that in 99.9% of those solutions _NO_ downtime was experienced at all. None. Nada. Zippo. Zilch . . . you get the picture. :)
We are willing to wager that this has been the experience of most any client of an IT Solution Provider that has a properly configured SBS/SMB/SME IT Solution deployed _and managed_ in-house.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
Got it in 1 Philip! The cloud has a lot to answer for. We have moved some clients (at their request!!!) to cloud based services and we find that the reliability is less than before, support issues take longer (we just become the middle man in the support handling) and the client's long term costs increase hugely. The cloud definately has it's place but I can't help but feel that us IT pros are getting dragged in a direction that we don't want to go and that are actually worse for the client. IME, the only people that benefit from the cloud are the owners of the cloud. All in the name of progress hey...
ReplyDeleteYou got that right Paul! The only people I see continually talking and talking until you're tired of hearing it are the one's with a financial interest in some type of cloud service. I'd rather have one client's server go down and go to work on it than have ALL of my client's systems go down and can do nothing but sit around and wait and get an earful from ALL of my clients. If the one goes down, and you get fired, ok, so you lost one. If ALL go down and you get fired, you hope McDonald's is hiring!
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