• nick.barrett - Thursday, September 21, 2017 2:54 AM

    'email may never come back on-premises' ?
    Outside the US, and with regard to the very long arms of the Patriot Act, there are many regulated market sectors whose data-security risk assessment keeps them well away from any US-domiciled service providers... and then there is the EU, with its new General Data Protection Regulation, which also constrains many sectors to keep the majority of their data [and data flows] well away from the major cloud service providers.
    Many applications not handling personal data -are- suited to migration to cloud services;  many are already hosted somewhere by service providers hurriedly re-branding their hosted service as a Cloud Offering... but until there is clear legal separation between in-country operators and their US parent brands that offers true protection from data access by DHS, acceptable to regulators, many markets will ignore the benefits of cloud.

    This leads to an interesting thought.  The trend (currently) is to migrate things like e-mail off-premise because (in theory) you no longer need to pay someone to manage your Exchange / sendmail / postfix / etc system and it's required hardware.  BUT with in some locales the increasing requirements of maintaining data privacy will potentially result in a return to on-premise, we control it all, e-mail.

    I have to wonder, also, how many businesses are rushing to the "cloud" without really thinking about what they really expect from it.  Where I work, we're supposed to be migrating to "the cloud" and have some rather stringent requirements when it comes to both what can connect to our network (so no just spinning up some Azure SQL instances for me,) and what we are required to have monitoring those systems.  So far, our "cloud" looks like it's going to be nothing more than our current setup of virtual machines picked up and dropped into some other data center outside our facility.  Some day.  Eventually.  Of course, at the current "blistering" pace of our migration, I'll probably have moved on from this position before anything gets done (they've been talking about it since I started about 3-4yrs ago, and there's been no movement that I can see in the last couple years.)