• I've been telling people that for ages, ever since "the cloud" appeared. Same with server virtualisation. When an outage occurs in "the cloud" (or at least a part of it) even if it's nothing to do with "your" system, you're still affected by it and if you're a small company trying to do big things with little funding, who is the supplier going to fix first ?

    If you've a virtualised server environment and the hardware fails, you'll no doubt have a more resilliant system than a traditional bank of servers but ultimately if you have to bring that hardware off-line, it's everything off-line. Yes it can fail over to alternative hardware but it could still be a single point of failure. Ever had a catastrophic disc controller crash / hardware failure on a storage array ? It's not necessarily the time it takes to recover, but the loss in business or the ability to provide services when everything is relying on "one" piece of kit rather than separate.

    How many of the cloud providers are going to be in business in a few years time and what happens if they get taken over - how easy is it to change from one to another, how easy is it to maintain control of your data.

    It's all a trade off in terms of cost, support, resilliance and security.

    It's not the be all and end all that some have proclaimed it to be.