I remember having a discussion with one of my executive buddies a while back, talking about this whole business of shoving IT up into the “Cloud” and away from in-house (local) processing. My buddy, (who is still very active in business) stated that he would never, ever do that because of control concerns; I went even further and said that were I the CEO of a corporation and an executive even suggested such an action to me, I’d fire him on the turn.
Here’s the reason for my intransigence, and it’s a topic I’ve banged on about before: the allure of “convenience” without caring about (or intentionally disregarding) the risk of vulnerability. Here’s an example in a microcosm.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we still did a lot of paper printing, as email communication of large files and documents was beyond the ability of most systems to accomplish large-scale dissemination. At the same time, though, systems were changing from stand-alone processing into networked systems, and the most obvious of these was in the area of shared printers (as opposed to each workstation having its own printer).
Of course, IT was all over the networked printing principle because, as one clueless IT person told me, “we only have to maintain and service one printer as opposed to dealing with several, so it’s more productive” — confusing, as I pointed out to him, their convenience with the user’s needs.
What, I asked him, was the point of sharing a single device when there’s a traffic jam of users waiting around the printer for their job to clear the queue? How productive was that, in the corporate sense, when one service technician would save time while half a dozen other workers were doing nothing? And even worse, of course, was the prospect of the printer failing altogether (for whatever reason), causing everybody to sit on their hands while the machine was being fixed or having its ink cartridge replaced; how productive was that scenario?
As I was beating my head against a corporate brick wall, I did what I normally do in such circumstances: I declared unilateral independence. I bought myself one of those HP500 inkjet printers (and black-ink cartridges) out of my own pocket and remained outside the system altogether, to the consternation of IT. (My boss, bless him, told them to go and fuck themselves — those exact words — when they asked him to strong-arm me into compliance.)
Then over the following six months I monitored the network printer activity and catalogued all the times it went down, then calculated the net cost to departmental productivity, and presented my findings to Management at our next inter-departmental meeting. (Basically, if the five largest users of the printers in our department had each had their own HP500, the department would have saved literally thousands of dollars in lost productivity. In fact, it would have been a zero-sum decision to equip each of those users with their own laser printer, never mind a cheapie HP500, and left “casual” printing — memos, etc. — on the network.)
I won the battle and lost the war, because IT took its revenge on me from then on by slow-walking all my projects — and I did a lot of those — through the system, using the “limited resources” argument because, I admit, my projects were resource intensive.
It did not help matters when personal computers came along. Of course, I was the first one to get one (out of my own pocket, again), enabling me to do a huge amount of developmental work independently of IT. The head of IT came into my office and asked me to give him a demonstration of my PC. I agreed to do it, but only after inviting my boss to sit in. Then I ran one of my routines on the PC and we sat for about ten minutes waiting for it to process. Of course, the IT guy sneered at the pace of the process, saying that the mainframe could have done the same job in seconds.
I then pointed out to my boss that the last time I had submitted an identical job through IT, I’d eventually got the output some three days later. (And yes, I had the documentation to substantiate it.)
My boss, bless him again, asked me if I could set up a PC for him because he too was sick of waiting for his jobs to get back to him.
A week later, Management received a proposal from IT to set up dumb terminals in all our offices so that we users would not have to become our own computer programmers. It was accepted by all the department managers except mine, who had in the interim found room in the budget to buy PCs for all the account executives, and tasked me with developing and delivering the necessary training. (I outsourced it to a buddy’s training company because I had things called “clients” who had greater need of my time.)
Anyway, I told you all that so I could talk about this.
You see, apart from any talk of productivity and convenience, the dirty little downside to Cloud-based single-source processing is that having a single source also means that there is an enormous risk when any bad actor or even incompetent actor (such as in the above case) gets to access the whole show. Single source also means incredibly-dangerous universal failure scenarios.
Ask the airlines, banks and hospitals affected by the above. And incidentally, state vehicle inspections in our area of north Texas were also affected in that their inspection equipment failed to operate — and the operators didn’t bother coming into work because why should they? And even when the systems did start working again, there was still a delay while the operators came back from their absence — machines and systems working: nobody to operate them.
As I discovered two days ago when I took my car in to be inspected, at two different locations hereabouts.
Now scroll back up and re-read the first paragraph of this post.
As a retired IT guy, my maxim has long been, “A good IT officer has / ensures a backup.”
As for the Cloud, it’s a lovely abstraction, but it’s still a bunch of computers somewhere and just as vulnerable to fire and disaster as anything. And then there’s the idiot worker with a digger / backhoe who cuts the cable.
Networked printers worked for me because they were faster and did things that my desktop printer didn’t. Plus they got me out of my chair and office for a short walk.
Cloud storage was supposed to be a solution single point of failure data storage. All it really did apparently was move that single point of failure from hardware to software that was no longer under your control. I never warmed up to the idea. And neither did my clients. Health care clients saw it as a HIPAA violation to not have full control of Patient’s data. Manufacturing saw it as an unacceptable security risk.
Look’s like they rolled out an update that was not fully beta tested.
For the provider, Cloud is yet another subscription that allows them to collect money without having to innovate much. You get to pay over and over for the privilege of using a program that has a subset of what the installable package had. Office is this way. The online versions of excel and visio don’t have functions that I use every day.
If memory serves, the initial selling point of cloud was that it was op-ex as opposed to cap-ex. The other one was that the end user gear could be dumb and easy to manage.
Whatever. The numbers don’t work. I’ve been reading articles lately about business finding that they can save millions by moving their IT back in house.
I warned the ex wife about cloud when her accounting firm was looking at it. For reasons I can’t fathom , they put her in charge of managing the IT. I told her all it would take is one woke employee at the provider to leak some of their influential client’s data and they’d be toast.
As a content creator who has observed the despicable behavior of tech companies (who consistently fail to observe social/moral norms), I here repeat what has almost become cliche: “The Cloud” means ” “somebody else’s computer.” And, referring again to tech company behavior (as above), remind everyone that possession is nine-tenths of the law and point out that nobody is better at rules lawyering than the bunch of underripe nerds in tech legal departments, it’s a short step from being on THEIR computer to becoming THEIR data. I wouldn’t even have my sites on ISPs’ servers if I could afford and maintain my own.
Ditto.
30 year IT guy here, and currently doing Cloud It work involving security.
The cloud had *nothing* to do with this outage, other than *maybe* some files being hosted on a content distribution network (that is a guess, not a statement of fact).
This outage was caused by CrowdStrike either having a crap process for “pushing” updates, or because someone bypassed that process.
Crowdstrike Falcon is, well, it’s basically what anti-virus software turned into, and if you have computers you need some sort of anti-virus. If you have networked computers you need to have that antivirus update quickly.
The screwup here was IT departments “trusting” a third party vendor. Except that businesses do that all the time. Other than Amazon, no one has their own delivery service. FedEx, UPS, etc. Hell, in the 90s it was all the rage to outsource everything BUT your “core competency”, so your mail room and your print shop might be staffed with people from a different company.
As someone who works with cloud schtuff, you have as much, if not more “control” over cloud resources than you do over “real” hardware. If I need a tiny little machine to do a tiny little thing, I can still get a single CPU “virtual” machine with a tiny (by today’s standards) amount of ram for almost free. If I need a 32 CPU machine with almost no storage, and a massive amount of network bandwidth, I not only can get it, but I can put it in the part of the world where it’s best for my use case. I can change and mix operating systems. I have access to layers of storage at different costs and speed. I can manage and manipulate my workloads and my costs on a very granular basis (and it’s *all* operating costs, no capital expenses). I can change and mix operating systems. I have access to layers of storage at different costs and speed.
I can set up and tear down whole networks of machines in minutes to hours, run a test, tear everything down, reconfigure it, and do it again.
I can set up a globe-spanning service in a couple hours that runs for exactly as long as I want it to, and then it can disappear, and I have no barely obsolete hardware that isn’t completely depreciated. And I can do these things *repeatably*. I can create configuration files that I can store in a version control system, so we can verify “what changed where”.
In many, many ways you have *more* control “in the cloud”.
In a very few ways you have less. You don’t get to pick your actual physical hardware…if you think there’s a real difference for business purposes between HP, SuperMicro and Dell…nope. You don’t have the servers in “your” buildings. Ok.
But Muh Data….Amazon Web Services did 90 BILLION dollars in revenue in 2023. The only reason they have any trouble at all hiring the best security guys in the business is that Google (with the Google Compute Platform) and Microsoft (with Azure) are after the same people.
Their security is WAY WAY better than yours. WAY better. They designed their systems such that they *can’t* see your data, because if “They” could it would eventually come out that they could, and that 90 billion would shrink to 10 billion in about 3 months, then the next year (as the lawsuits started) it would be negative.
Their storage systems are far superior to anything all but fortune 500 companies can afford…and most of those companies don’t. You don’t lose data in AWS because a drive failed, or a SAN had problems.
Heck, you don’t lose data because a *building* failed.
There are reasons to not be in the cloud for a lot of companies. Control, generally, is not one of them.
True, cloud has its place. AWS definitely has the resources to make incredibly reliable systems.
On the other hand, you have situations like this. My wife knows an author that had her Amazon publishing account, through which she sells her books, nuked. Can’t get an straight answer out of Amazon about *why*. Sure, it’s not anything close to the same scale as a Fortune 500 company using cloud compute resources, but, it’s devastating for her.
As a consulting engineer working on independent projects for the VP I would always be the last for an IT update. (this was back 20 years ago) I had my system set up the way I liked it and every time IT did an update it’d take me half a morning of unproductive time to straighten out the mess….so I’d tell him you’re not touching my machine. Then he’d get to begging me and because I’m not a “jerk” I’d relent.
One Word: DOMINION!
I don’t trust the cloud or much of IT for security. back in the day if you wanted to steal information from someone’s financial records or medical records and such, you had to break into the office where the files were located and then break into any secure room and file cabinets. Now you can do all that from the comfort of your own thieves den anywhere in the world. Naw, that’s just too weak for security.
youre absolutely right that anyone who suggests storing data in the cloud deserves a punch in the face and immediate removal from the company. I’m at the point where I htink a manual type writer would be be a great investment