There’s a story about three people being led to the guillotine in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The first is a priest. The priest approaches the guillotine, crosses himself, and is placed in the restraints. The executioner attempts to release the blade, but it sticks. “A miracle,” proclaims the crowd, and the executioner frees… [Read More]

Having roiled the water with my first five posts on the subject, I owe it to you to say where I come down on some cloud services. Here goes: Web hosting. To my mind, this is a clear win for cloud computing. I maintained my own Web server for many years. It was a lot… [Read More]

The last of the cloud disadvantages/concerns: Availability.  The reliability component of availability is one of the selling points of cloud computing, but it’s also one of the problems. If you’re selling cloud computing, you point out that your systems are highly redundant and maintained by expert technicians. If you have a more jaundiced point of… [Read More]

Another cloud disadvantage is… Performance. Cloud implementations have one strike against them from the get-go; with a few exceptions, they can’t possibly feel as crisp as their all-desktop equivalents because of network latency and bandwidth issues. Accessing your Exchange account through a browser provides an experience that looks remarkably like Outlook, but the performance is… [Read More]