Cloud computing already flopping? Lessons from Sony

The BBC never comes out and just asks the obvious question. Are the cases of Sony and Amazon just growing pains for the Cloud, or is the Cloud over hyped? Well given what some people were saying last year about saving the environment, reducing costs to a fraction, and giving better service it should come as no surprise that the Cloud turns out to have serious real world.

I have worked a great deal with the Cloud, and the conclusion I have come to is that it is a lot harder to execute than most people relieve. That people are going to certainly put a lot of stuff on the Cloud, but data centers will very often be the best value option for most Enterprises most of the time.

Cloud will be a bit win for SME, but they will have to live with security problem, loss of data, and all the million problem with making your business someone else's concern. Outsourcing never lived up to the hype and neither will the Cloud. Essentially the problem is that you are giving the core of your business to someone else. The smaller you are the more Cloud can do for you, but the less and less you matter to Cloud.

BBC News - Cloud computing after Amazon and Sony: ready for primetime?: "Cloud computing may be the hottest thing in corporate computing right now, but two IT disasters - at Amazon and Sony - beg the question: Is cloud computing ready for primetime business?

It's a nightmare moment. You are under pressure - to meet customer orders, finish a project, execute a deal - and nothing. Your computers, servers or network are down. If you are lucky, a few nail biting hours and a reboot or three later, you and your IT team have restored services.

But what if your IT infrastructure goes down and there's nothing you can do because your computing power sits in the cloud, provided over the internet by another company? When a key part of Amazon's EC2 cloud service collapsed, many of the firm's customers were reduced to publishing apologies on their websites, and click 'refresh' on Amazon's service health dashboard.

Two of Sony's online gaming services, meanwhile, were hacked, compromising confidential data of more than 100 million customers."