THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

I guess you tied your blindfold extra hard today?

You've proven your ability to take screenshots. Congratulations.

You've also proven that the apple is not an orange. What a waste Susan, but good job giving hope to people that look at this world the same, they are missing an opportunity of a lifetime and maybe they'll still visit your blog from the job once their IT business goes under for fighting to build something new businesses don't actually want.

-Vlad

The thing that bugs be about hosting is that host site admin on the night shift who gets bored at 2 AM in the morning and decides to start poking around in my data.  The host people really need to prove to me that they can prevent "bored admin syndome"...

You forgot to add the bandwidth cost to get to that hosting solution.

ADSL/T1 is generally adequate for an onsite box, but getting to a hosting solution where you need to transfer large data sets means that SHDSL/T3/direct Ethernet becomes less of an option and more of a requirement.

This gets very expensive if you're in a place like Australia.

Good analysis of the numbers.  There's more to the decision, but it really SHOULD start with the numbers.

I've worked through two previous cycles of "service bureau" outsourcing.  Many of those apps were brought back in-house, but not all.

The pendulum is swinging towards the cloud.  It'll swing back, eventually and somewhat.  But some people will like it out there, at least for some things.  And the internet, SaaS and vast numbers of highly capable data centers provide today's out-sourcers with far better capabilities than the last two "service bureau" waves enjoyed.

We really need both capabilities.  Cloud for some, in-house for others.  

I'll muddle along, as I always have, trying to help my clients find the right solution - or mix - for their needs.

Cloud computing looks ok for SBS sized companies, but what about bandwidth and connectivity failiures. I wouldnt like to be resposible for choosing the Cloud way on the days of internet outage. And dont just say "redundant internet connections" - its not that easy. The redundant connections would have to be split between wired and wireless and that can become quite costly for a SBS sized company.

@susan: if you have a resource that are willing to come to my site and manage my server for 5k initial and 2k/year, i'll take 5.  Right now, if i wanted to stand up my own exchange/sharepoint environment, step 0 would be to hire a full time infrastructure admin, and a straight-out-of-college CS major is going to hit me up for 50k/year.

then, what happens if i'm successful? what happens if my 5 employees balloons up to 25? then 50? branch offices? then 250?  unified communications? how much more IT staff do i need?

@soren: when the office connection goes down, everyone whips out their webcams and works from home. ;)

Thank you Susan for presenting this viewpoint.

I congratulate you for presenting the alternative viewpoint that you have, that speaks over and above the marketing hype that we consistently hear about.

For me the main sticking point is privacy. I would never put my internal documents, intellectual property, customer lists, etc. on a hosted site no matter what, despite the fact that we could greatly benefit from such a solution, having 2 offices and a 16 hour-per-day operation.

For instance, document sharing and shared CRM among the offices is an area that a hosted solution could benefit us - but I'd much rather the current topology (secure VPN, internally hosted everything and even a painful Goldmine sync) and overhead in maintenance than relinquish control by going to the cloud.

It's about time that sanity prevailed instead of hype. Thanks for a breath of fresh air.

Vlad Thurrott (yes I kow it's 2 differant people) can't get pass the Mirosoft incentive program, get a clue most (at least my well informed clients) will not risk critical metadata in the cloud, the cloud may indeed be appropriate for certain types of SMB's but it's not the be all solution (As Susan rightly points out) Inform client's as to all alternitives, show them the risks, costs, and performance, a well informed client can indeed make a good decision. Honestly the consaultant retains their clients no matter what they use as long as you to support them and guide the process through.