Silicon Shecky

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Just a few thoughts

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It’s been an interesting week, so lets just take a moment to toss out a few thoughts.

First thing is the whole patent wars that are going on now. I find it awful, stupid and deplorable. This is what happens when companies are afraid of each other. Instead of working on making things better and competing, they just try to sue each other.

Next on the hit list is Cloud Computing. Microsoft is all in, Amazon and Google have their offerings, and still it hasn’t taken off the way some people thought it would. There are a lot of statistics out there showing that people are moving to the cloud. The problem is what is the definition of the cloud in each case. To be honest, working with small businesses, I don’t see a lot of movement to the cloud for anything other than backup. The biggest reason being they can’t afford the speeds to make cloud computing worth it for anything else.

Coming up in a few weeks are Black Hat, Defcon and B-Sides all out in the Las Vegas area. For those who are going, I look forward to reading your reports and thoughts. Myself, I can’t afford to on my own (Money and time off), and my office won’t pay for me to go to them. So I will try to keep up on the web, see whatever videos I can, and just wait.

Finally, on a totally different tangent, The San Diego Convention going on right now. I refuse to call it Comic-Con, since it really is geared toward the entertainment industry in general, and more specifically a showcase of Hollywood’s attempts to cater to geeks. Sorry, not buying it.

Why Cloud Computing Hasn’t Completely Taken Off

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So Microsoft is declaring this year, yet again, the year of cloud computing. I’m going to a meeting with a different partner on cloud computing. You hear that cloud computing is the wave of the future and can save SMBs money. while all that might be true based on a cost per on site server and maintenance versus cost of having a hosted solution, there are reasons why cloud computing hasn’t quite taken off the way everyone figures it will.

The biggest issue with hosted solutions, otherwise known as cloud computing, can be summarize in one word, bandwith. From experience with my clients, they get a T1 line, a business class cable line, or some other line that at best offers them maybe 3MB upstream and 6MB downstream. Most use T1’s which is only 1.5MB up and down stream. Heck I have clients that constantly complain about their speed, and yet are not willing to pay more than the $500-$1000 that they are already paying for Internet access. Some have remote locations where a user or two sits, and then complains about load times (even when they are just going into a terminal server) because of lack of bandwith.

Now, you take an average SMB office and the people in it. for a 5person office, you have e-mail, documents, maybe some web sites they need to connect to. Now add on the family type atmosphere that allows, music streaming, YouTube, and all sorts of other fun stuff that can eat up bandwith. All of a sudden that T1 is filled. Now if you try to move that server up to the cloud, you hit more traffic that needs to go up and down that 1.5MB pipe. Talk about lag city.

Unfortunately, we are a culture where T1 is fast has been ingrained in our brains. My home Internet has 1.5MB upstream but is 18MB downstream. Yeah, that’s 12 times as fast. People who have Verizon’s FIOS can get 50-100MB up and down. A T1 line now compared to what one can get for their house for way less, is like a 36K modem compared to a T1 10 years ago. The pricing for a T1 is way out of whack with the times, and faster speeds for business become cost prohibitive. The slow upgrade of the ISPs to a full cost effective fiber solution is the biggest barrier to point of entry for cloud computing.

The day will come when bandwith will be affordable enough that cloud computing will take off. That day though, is not here yet.

The problems with the Cloud…

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Everyone is talking about Cloud computing. Put things up on The Cloud. SMBs save money by moving to The Cloud. The Cloud is not everything its cracked up to be though, as one of the biggest cloud providers has recently shown.

Before we get into the heart of this op/ed type piece (I do try to use facts, but the thoughts are my own), let us take a basic look at what cloud computing is generally being marketed as. The basic idea is that you remove the server from your location, put it on the Internet through a secure host (the biggest names hosting are Microsoft, Amazon and Google), therefor giving you the ability to work from anywhere, not have to worry about server maintenance, or having an IT department( there are other aspects such as MSPs, Backup to remote data centers, and more that do not apply to this article). To quote the movie Murder by Death, “Interesting theory, one small problem. Is stupid, is most stupid theory I ever heard!”

Why is it so stupid (In my opinion). For a few reasons. First and foremost is security. Take a look at the recent problems with Google and China and you will see what I mean. The hacking, the lack of being able to harden a server yourself (or letting an IT company you can hold responsible), the lack of control. Take a look at what is going on through some of the security sites, not just the small spattering you hear from mainstream media(which will not always tell you the full story due to corporate connections). Now you might say, but I’m small why would someone want to hack me, and that is not the reason you would be hacked. It could be a side effect of being hosted on a much more visible target (again, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc…).

Once you get past the security aspect, you run into, what happens to your data overall. Who owns it? If you got out of business, does it get destroyed properly? What if you decide to move off the cloud to a local server, does the hosting company have to keep copies of your data due to regulations? A lot of those types of issues are easily solved through contracts, but are you reading through the contract properly. From personal experience with Off-Site backups, the company I work for and our partners put in writing that the data is our clients, and if they want it destroyed due to changing services, going out of business etc… we can do that. This is just data backup though. What about when your whole server is up there?

Finally the reason the cloud is not ready for prime time is infrastructure. Mostly ISP speeds and costs. think about it, you start saving money by bringing your server up to the cloud, but find that access times to files, to e-mails, is extremely slow, and that cuts down on your productivity. The fastest you can go is going to be the slowest link in the chain.

Most businesses are still working off the T1 assumption. A T1 is 1.5Mbp downstream and upstream. This really is not a lot compared to the sizes of files, amount of data being transmitted, and other small factors such as number of people sharing that line. If you are on the cloud, you no longer have just e-mail constantly streaming in, but authentication protocols, Active Directory communications (if its a Microsoft server), Word documents, Quickbooks data (if needed) and much more. Think of it this way, the average home Internet speed is 12Mbp down, 1.5 Mbp up. Faster on the downstream, same on the upstream, which would be your clog. A T1 averages $500-$1000 per month. Home Internet costs around $30-$70 per month but does not have the Quality of service needed to be reliable for could computing. Fiber Internet is the solution (60+Mbp down and up for $1000=$1500 per month right now), but availability of it is spotty at best. Until this bottleneck is fixed, no matter how secure it might be, or guarantees about the data ownership are resolved, I cannot recommend could computing.

The biggest thing to realize is that there is give and take in everything. To really come up with savings, you have to figure in items such as security, lost time due to connectivity, plus you still need someone to be able to take care of your local PCs. A good local IT consultant in the long run is still a better option for most SMBs. A Managed Service Plan with a local IT firm is probably the best, cause its a one low cost solution that covers most everything, and you can budget for because the cost is locked in for the length of the contract. Think about that before you go cloud hopping.