Cloud computing myth

It started with virtualization and now it is cloud computing. Cloud computing is officially “in”, must have service. But the question is how cloud computing is helping your efforts and is it making your life easier? A little bit of both I would say. Cloud computing can actually reduce costs for a businesses that embrace cloud computing. Good example of cloud computing are Google Apps and Amazon S3 services. With Google apps, you can run your business on a relatively inexpensive computer, which is able to run Internet browser. So no longer do you need to pay Microsoft license fees for Exchange, Windows, MS Office and similar products, you can do it all using Google Apps. There are few problems here, what do you do when Google Apps are experiencing an outage which can sometimes last for hours or days? What do you do when you loose internet access at your place of work, or you don’t have internet access where you are currently? What is with privacy issues when you trust someone with your confidential business and financial data? Can you call someone in Google Apps and ask them, hey can you please restore this file from a last month’s backup? I don’t think so. In my opinion all of these are issues which are severely limiting cloud computing initiative and in my opinion are making cloud computing not usable. My preferred method of running a business would be to run Linux on all desktops and use open source tools for email and office documents. Off course I would have backups on site and off site. In my opinion this is much better solution than cloud computing since I am in control of my data all the time