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Clouds Ain't Always Cheap

Cloud computing is supposed to save us all tons of dough. You do away with your servers, disks, interconnects and air conditioners, and run all your software over the wire from a cloud. You presumably save on hardware, energy and management.

But cloud services don't magically configure themselves or keep themselves up-to-date. Some, like BitCurrent analyst Alistair Croll (I imagine Alistair with a pipe, a smoking jacket and a shelf full of dusty old books), believe it can actually be more difficult and expensive to manage this remote software. Not only will admins have to administer this software, but their companies may add more and more applications to the mix -- increasing complexity and admin time.

Do you care about clouds? Have you found any good Web sites that cover cloud services or teach you how to build your own clouds? URLs welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 22, 2008


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