• Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 8:29 AM

    jasona.work - Tuesday, April 24, 2018 7:32 AM

    People need to realize, the cloud providers are not there to make their lives easier by taking on all of the assorted sysadmin / DBA type work, they're there to make *money.*  So the providers will give you only the service specified in their TOS / contract, and not one fraction more.  So take the time to read through those terms, if possible get a lawyer to read them over, check their online documentation to check what they do / don't do (IE nightly backups with unlimited retention on your storage) then decide if they meet your needs.

    Like any business. They are in the business of profit. Some are better at customer service and trying to ensure they meet your needs. Some do the minimum. Getting referrals, understanding the experiences of others, these are just as valuable in the digital world as the analog world.

    Any time discussion of "the cloud" comes up, I'm reminded of an XKCD cartoon from earlier this year...
    It was a joke list of "major 2018 security vulnerabilities" and one of the items on the list?  "Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers."

    Which, really, is all the cloud is.  So if people keep that in mind when they look at going to the "cloud," I suspect they'd be a bit more diligent in determining if a particular provider is going to meet their needs or not.