

This house believes that the cloud can't be entirely trusted. - bensummers
http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/409

======
jacquesm
The cloud _will_ be huge at some point, right now the numbers simply aren't
there and there have been too many high profile glitches in recent times to
get fence sitters to switch in large numbers.

Comparing the costs of cloud hosted computation and storage facilities with a
100 Mbit flat rate box with 500G on board for $130 / month is a good exercise
and seems to indicate that cloud storage and bandwidth are much too expensive
to be competitive except for some very specific uses.

Price is of course only one factor in making this decision (reliability,
scalability are the others), but as someone put it nicely building your small
web app on top of the cloud infrastructure is essentially a case of premature
optimization.

It's a time of transition, maybe in the long run everything will be 'cloud
based', but I think there is definitely a hybrid possible, where the same
architectural tricks that go in to cloud computing are used by hosting centers
to facilitate easy deployment.

Portability between suppliers is another key sticking point, right now the
cloud seems to be more about locking in customers than anything else.

~~~
bensummers
The only thing the cloud can do cheaper right now is massive amounts of
compute power for short periods of time. If you need to do something every
month which takes 1000 CPU-days, but needs to be done in a day for the results
to be of use, you've either got to buy lots of hardware or use the cloud.

The ability to do this cost effectively could make certain computations
viable, opening up new opportunities for people to do interesting and useful
things.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, exactly, that is what I had in mind with my 'specific uses'.

------
milestinsley
I don't think the question is whether it can be trusted or not. That's pretty
ambiguous and, as mentioned, you can't really put 100% trust in anything.
Also, the meaning of 'the cloud' has become diluted, seeing it's now analogous
with pretty much anything web based. We might as well call it "scalable,
distributed and virtualized computing" or something.

The question, for me, comes down to education and understanding. The term 'the
cloud' is relatively nascent, but the basic underlying principles are not
really that new, just more evolved. The cloud is as secure and reliable as you
make it. By definition it promotes redundancy, accessibility and scalability.

I work on a 'cloud' claims management application and it's targeted at the
enterprise (finance/insurance) market, who are notoriously slow to adopt new
technology. Trust me, it's a tough audience, but not as tough as you might
think. The realization that data can be accessed (and work done) anywhere, at
negligible cost with existing hardware is simply too compelling for any
forward thinking company.

Quite simply, the pros seriously outweigh the cons - whereas the opposite is
true for traditional client-server technology.

~~~
rubinelli
I don't think client-server is the alternative to the cloud. The only company-
wide client-server application I saw in most organizations was Outlook. The
rest, from time tracking to individual performance evaluation, was all done in
the intranet. So the real choice is between hosting in the cloud or self-
hosting.

------
patrickgzill
Just like the goldbugs say (in respect to owning physical gold instead of
holding it in ETFs), "If you don't hold it, you don't own it."

------
bensummers
But can anything be _entirely_ trusted?

