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by ThomaszKrueger 3899 days ago
I read somewhere that the cloud is just someone's else computer. At least in the business I am working with that would never be allowed so if there is a cloud to be had it will be on premises, which may keep these so-called walking dead lumbering for quite some time.
4 comments

Yes, there are plenty of businesses which would never put their data on someone else's servers.

Also, you should never underestimate corporate inertia. Switching to a new system is immensely expensive, for many companies it won't happen, ever. Just look how many companies are still using decade old hardware and scour ebay for replacement 286 processors.

How much of that immense expense is due to various factors that can be summed up as "obstinance", and how much is due to actual, practical, tangible factors?

I'm not being snarky - I've seen many a large business make many a horrible decision, not due to a dispassionate evaluation of the pros and cons of each option, but because the people in charge hate change. And it's not that said change would be necessarily painful or demonstrably bad, it's an irrational bias.

Change hate appears to scale linearly with organizational size, more specifically, number of managerial staff.

This isn't an argument against them being the "walking dead."

If nobody was using them anymore, they'd just be the dead-dead. The "walking" part comes from their existing support base propping them up.

"Oracle and EMC are fine, just like 286s!" is not an argument that would comfort an executive at those companies.

This article simplifies that problem is that these companies are "fucked by cloud". As you pointed out many companies will never migrate to cloud - never. But they will not buy expensive storage from EMC or expensive network equipment from Cisco.

It is not only about cloud. It is that these companies did not evolve to match current needs: it is about sales process (just try to buy cloud from Oracle and you will see), it is about support, it is about pricing, it is about technology (SOAP?) ...

Even if I wanted to put everything into the cloud, our main office has 2 MBit upload on a good day, with no infrastructure improvement in sight (old building on top of a hill in rural Austria). And even our branch office only gets 10/10 MBit in the middle of the country's second-largest city.

We're going to keep local servers for a looong time to come.

A lot of these are compliance legal reasons, but you know what.. the laws can change! Even the government is using AWS now.