My thoughts on cloud computing

Seems like every dropout asshole who was lucky enough to land a CEO job these days is talking about "the future" and where this wonderful cloudy technology will take us forward and make things magically work. Even Ballmer is banging clouds these days, which is kind of scary when you think about it. He messed up with Vista, so you can bet your pants the Microsoft cloud will be more like a smelly swamp than a clear blue sky.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you my thoughts on whatever is called cloud computing and how it may affect our customers who trust us with their most precious data and business processes.

The short version: cloud computing sucks.

The slightly longer version: this reminds me of the RISC / CISC debate many years ago where people would debate the pros and cons of processors using a reduced set of instructions. For one thing, most of them never opened their computer and try to actually spot where the main CPU was on the motherboard. Most of them never wrote a program in assembler language. Most of them could not even fully describe what a microprocessor did. But all of them could paint a bright future where RISC processors would allow us to be more efficient and do more things - whatever those "things" were - and it would be so great and so and so.

Cloud computing is simply the latest snake oil flavor for "luminaries" and sales people with mild mental disorder. It's the most up-to-date line of BS to sell you the same hardware and software that they've been shoving down the throat for the past 20 years. You can apply a fresh coat of paint on a clunker, it is still a clunker. It is just that.

Do you really think our customers want their proprietary data to float somewhere between Pakistan and China? What would be the impact of having your proprietary data into the hands of a 20 years old hacker trading sensitive information for a living?

Your PC is crashing all the time thanks to the sustained effort of those dweebs in Redmond, and those same geniuses want to catapult your sensitive data in hyperspace without a GPS.

Everyone who ever had a real job in IT can testify that sloppiness is almost a virtue, like things are all messed up and it is considered "normal". Passwords are never reset, access privileges are never audited, and expensive servers are always idle while others are always saturated. It's IT business as usual. And IT mirrors the human condition when you think about it. Cloud computing is just a positive imaging technique to cover all the crap and mishaps going on, really.

So will a fuzzy cloudy technology based on loosely-based relations will be able to address human sloppiness and carelessness? Ask your vendor.