"there is no cloud, only somebody else’s computer"
i don't like this saying
because cooperation is inconceivable, legally binding contracts are a thing from the future, and if you wanna go that way nothing is ever yours anyway.
It is any more yours if you employ sysadmins directly? Why would <company> in between break it?
Is it only yours if it's stored in your garage on ADSL without UPS and you have no practical control or understanding of it?
Is your garage even yours? What if it's rented?
I see that as some cloud fearmongering that went wrong.
It's okay to say free public cloud "as in Google Drive" has issues. It does.
But enterprise cloud "as in AWS"? It's just rented servers space, people. Not any different that what was happening before we called everything "cloud". Not less secure than a bunch of badly managed hardware.
Leaks? Oh don't worry some incompetent admins were throwing away unencrypted disks long before the cloud was a thing.
@CobaltVelvet Would you like to have a private police paid for with taxes, too?
Excuse the irony, but it's the same case. “Let's give (probably foreign) private companies control over our data and our processes. What could go wrong?”
@josemanuel Entirely depend on the contact. I don't care if the police is private, if they have decent law and constraints to follow and are responsible for their doings, and that is managed by a neutral entity I more-or-less approve of (which would now be the government).
It already is, just on a individual level. Having an entity in between doesn't change *anything* at all.
@josemanuel You can make contracts that will guarantee your rights on your data, there are cloud providers dedicated to these use cases and, globally, that's just enterprise-grade stuff, nothing exotic.
@josemanuel (and I never said anything about it having to be foreign; surely the French government /should not/ host its top secret data on US servers, *but* there are regional providers too, and AWS would still be better than some things we can see in the wild)
@CobaltVelvet As the govt being a huge user of computing resources, they are almost certainly large enough to benefit of operating their own "cloud" solution. That doesn't have to mean they don't buy any 3rd party solutions or contract anything, but there just should be at least very solid "in-house" expertise in form own govt employees being actual experts.
@CobaltVelvet I think we already learned the lesson, not just with the IT infrastructure, but all kind of infra. Like, road building, when the government was reduced to only being able to contract and had no own experts, just hired consultants, it didn't end up well. There just seems to be a lot of correlation in keeping the costs low and having strong in-house expertise or competing public bidders.
@pinkpony yes, they can and should
@CobaltVelvet ...and for businesses in Europe, a concern right now is legal protections against access by US authorities in particular, since that endangers their compliance to local privacy regulations. The courts know that "privacy shield" is a farce, even if politicians won't admit to it.
Anyway, "it's just someone else's computer" probably doesn't mean a lot to todays users, who have been growing up on tablets and smartphones that are backed by "cloud" services by design.
Should everyone manage their own local physical infrastructure?
(and everyone includes corporations and gov agencies)
I honestly don't think that's currently a good solution.
- it costs much more
- it requires much more skills and fails much harder with the lack of it
I really prefer to see my gov/corps to finance The Cloud than pay an incompetent idiot to cluelessly manage bare metal servers or a huge opportunistic service provider that will take 50k$ and provide a 50$/month-worth thing.