I don't have a fraction of the IT experience that most of you do. I don't pretend otherwise. However, as a tech journalist, I've been covering enterprise IT for 20 years. I interview dozens of major corporate CIOs every year. Pretty much ALL medium/large corporations -- the Fortune 1,000 -- spend thousands or even millions of dollars annually on cloud services/storage. There are many reasons why they do it. None of those reasons include, "Because they're stupid." I chuckle a little when I read comments from people who think they know better than all the massive international conglomerates whose budgets fuel the many-billion-dollar cloud computing industry. On Fri, Nov 30, 2018, 1:22 AM Laura S. Reinhard via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org wrote:
While I am beginning to doubt my “belonging” in this group, primarily because my experience in IT has been limited to individual artists and their Macs and developing databases for them in FileMaker to keep up mailing lists (when people used to use mail).
I often sound like I know less than I do, because I am more interested in big pictures than technical terminology (which is why Apple Store hired me... my ability to “plain speak” technology. However many true tech folk think I am an idiot when they first talk to me about it.
Why say all of this? Two reasons. First, I didn’t formally introduce myself to this list and since I will be at Festivus am worried that “they’re all gonna laugh at me”. Second, I replied to this particular post because of my complete distrust in cloud storage. There is no way to even pretend they can be “safe”. Ever since I bought my 2010 iMac and had no disc to boot from and had to rely on everything being web-based, I have had nothing but horrible experiences, primarily because of my early Mac user ignorance about viruses and malware. I realize that was not the clouds fault, but the concept of “everything wireless” is mind-boggling naive and this post seems to agree? Also, confirmed my thought that this shift to such insecure methods of data management/storage is because young “bros” are in charge lol.
Hope this meandering response made sense and doesn’t serve to make me appear even less tech nerdy to you all. Hopefully Festivus won’t be like a middle school dance I have to call my mom from haha!
See you all there.
Laura On Nov 30, 2018, 12:42 AM -0500, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org>, wrote:
On 11/29/18 11:40 PM, W2HX via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I dunno, Dave. Some pretty damn big companies like Netflix, AirBNB, Atlassian, et. al., all seem to think its the right thing to use someone else's toothbrush. Fact is, thousands of companies use AWS. Almost 100% of start ups, my own included, with tens of millions of investment use cloud systems (aws and azure - another toothbrush, not our own) all seem to think it is a better idea to use someone else's toothbrush rather than using their own.
And of course they're free to do so. I would never deny that it's common, but I'm not too worried about that, as I've never been much of a "follower". I do (and recommend) what's right in my judgment, not what others tell me to do.
That said, though, I don't build Netflix-sized networks. Netflix seldom asks for my advice. ;) If Netflix came asking, I'd have to say "I'm sorry, you're talking to the wrong guy, I cannot do what you need." I've built Netflix-sized networks, but that was a long time ago, and it's no longer in my area of expertise. But small organizations of 1-30 people with specialized needs do solicit my advice, and what I tell them in most cases is "keep your own data". In the present context, we're talking about an inventory database for a club, to keep track of a few thousand items. There is no earthly need to farm that out to a timesharing provider. Further, such a small organization is a lot more likely to be hurt by a hosting provider's outage than a company like Atlassian, which will have SLAs with big penalties, offsite backups, and DR plans to cover their asses. Is VCF prepared to set up all of that? If not, are they prepared to periodically start over from scratch?
As a CTO myself with 39 years in IT, if I were to go on a job interview and insist that purchasing, depreciating, maintaining and staffing my own data center (24x7) was a better idea than using a cloud infrastructure (because that would be stupid), I don't think that would be a winning interview 9 times out of 10.
If you have 39 years in IT, that's six or seven years more than me, and that means both of us separately have been doing this longer than Netflix, AirBNB, and Atlassian, combined, have existed. In my experience, the vast majority of the kids managing those networks have no idea of what they're doing, and it shows in the downtime. I'm grateful that I, for any of MY important data, don't have to rely on them for anything. Most of the data stored on my network is generated, not downloaded (and thus easily replaced). I can't just start over when AWS burps and files disappear, and I can't afford to just take the afternoon off when the "cloud" service blows up. You can take that risk if you want, but I won't. For my work, there is zero benefit to farming it out. That's actually true of many small organizations, but most people have fallen for the "cloud" hype.
(For added fun, ask Matt Patoray how well that works for the support department's cloud-hosted VoIP phone system at his place of work. Better get some popcorn, in case you get him started.)
About job interviews...I generally don't go on job interviews, so I'm not too worried about what the right HR buzzwords are. My singular focus is uptime and data preservation, not "sounding right" to someone who has fallen for the hype in order to get a job.
Please understand that this isn't a case of hiding one's head in the sand or not being aware of what's cool and trendy in I.T. this year. I'm not a hobbyist...I assure you that I know exactly what AWS is, and rare is a day when I'm not logged into a couple of AWS-hosted servers. My experience tells me that it is a colossally bad idea. If your experience has been better, that's great. I respect your opinion, but I do not share it.
For years, we've all seen a great push to get rid of all internal I.T. infrastructure, datacenters in particular. This is driven primarily by economics, rather than technical merit. Being able to write it off as an operating expense for the tax benefit is a lot more palatable than shelling out the money for a big purchase and putting it on a depreciation schedule, and then there's having to employ all those inconvenient technical people who aren't team players, don't play golf, and aren't even decent enough to wear ties. There are no such concerns in the context of VCF's inventory database.
I dunno. Hard to swim against the tide on this one but YMMV.
I have no need to swim against any tide. It's just that I learned very early on not to depend on other peoples' computers for any of my operations, and I don't recommend that others do it either.
I realize that this is not a commonly-held opinion, but I'm not too worried about that. My clients do not come to me for commonly-held opinions. They can Google for those.
With respect, -Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA