October 7, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Take the Plunge
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October 8, 2008 at 1:55 am
One concern I would have is that I would not want to be unable to access all my office documents - including invoices etc - just because someone down the road put a spade through a cable.
I want my documents held locally and backed up offsite.
October 8, 2008 at 2:41 am
Good post.
I'm only 27 years old but I feel conservative as well sometimes.
I do not like the thought of someone else being in control of my data. Simple as that.
I know so many cases of where companies does crimes or takes advantage of someone else because of the situation the companies are in. Perhaps in most cases the risk is low, but I feel all the implications that comes with someone else holding my data is a situation I would not like to be in.
October 8, 2008 at 4:44 am
That was a superb article....
First of all its a new info to me and I liked the Microsoft Live software... 🙂 (... trying out still 😉 )
But its practical use or its success may be decided by the time.... If internet is not an issue (which is an issue in my country...) there are futures for such hosting....
Still giving my data for a person whom I even don't know doesn't feel good.
October 8, 2008 at 6:19 am
I guess it depends on how important your data is.
Some time ago I mentioned in a response to a previous editorial a figure that scared me - one bank found recently that some of its employees were selling customer account info for as little as $20-30 a pop. Giving your data to someone else can be surprisingly risky considering how little it apparently takes to bribe people. Add to this the tendency for some firms to farm their operations out to overseas entities and now you have people living in a country with a 20-1 exchange ratio guarding you data. If you compare that to the first figure I mentioned, it means bank account data would go for as little as $1.00!
Just a few days ago in this site's editorial "Social Hacks" we were told that seemingly innocuous information like birthdates can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Sorry, but if your data has any importance at all it's a bad idea to give it to someone else.
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October 8, 2008 at 7:06 am
It depends on what you're doing. I currently work for a SaaS company and we take great care to ensure that you have access to your data and that your data is not accessible by others. It's a paid service and backups, maintenance, etc are part of the service. Of course, if the Internet connection goes down anywhere, you're still at a loss, but most of this is more along the lines of contact information and a lot of customers have some form of backup online if they absolutely need that right now. However, the downtime has been minimal in the couple of years I've been with the company with most problems being local to the customer and only affecting them, not everyone. Another benefit for them is that we handle security, including the various attacks that affect/target web servers. They don't need to worry about port scanners, SQL Injection, etc because we handle that. For smaller customers, that's a pretty big benefit because they often don't have people who know what to look for and keep everything up to date.
Having seen the good and the bad about SaaS solutions, I feel relatively comfortable with using a paid solution for the most part. I may not want to trust my business to a free version of an online service, but most paid services I'd be pretty comfortable with. And for my needs, if I start a business, I'll probably be using a shared web host for a time. Unless it's some major online video/audio streaming site or gets a lot of hits, I'd be comfortable at least starting that way. Web hosts can handle a lot of the day to day details that I wouldn't really have time and/or people to handle. I could concentrate on the actual site design and architecture as well as my business - they can handle the details behind the scenes. After a while or as popularity grew, that would be the time to look at migrating to a dedicated server.
Even for our church, we've switched over to Google Apps for mail. It gives us portability if we change web hosting companies and a lot more features than we typically get. I'm aware of the dangers there, but the benefits are pretty good for a smaller church. I know of some churches that have really taken to the whole Apps suite. Others (like us) are just using Mail right now. This obviously isn't the decision for everyone and the limit on messages sent per day can be stifling for some. For us, it's not a huge deal as we're relatively small.
October 8, 2008 at 7:20 am
Quite frankly trusting the internet with your business data is insane.
By necessity the only third-party data service I trust with my data is ADP payroll--and only because everyone is so paranoid about payroll data ADP would go out of business if there was a breach. So they're going to be paranoid about security--which is a GOOD thing.
But who's going to guard correspondence with equal paranoia? Or invoices? Or data concerning inventory levels? But then again, isn't that exactly the kind of data your competitors might pay someone to dig up?
I work in a security-intense industry. We screw up, the data gets into the wrong hands, and someone could end up dead--literally. So I take security very very seriously. Even our non-critical data might get used for identity theft so nothing (apart from the payroll data mentioned earlier) gets out.
Of course when 80% of your employees carry guns you tend to keep security in the forefront of your thoughts. 🙂
October 8, 2008 at 7:28 am
I think I'd argue a little against that, but more on the side of the small business owner. Larger businesses can typically handle an IT staff, internal servers, and everything that comes with them. Small businesses often cannot. Non-profits with a lot of volunteers working for them probably don't have this either. There are times that putting your business data into a SaaS makes sense (like your example of ADP). Other times it may not. (For you, using Google Apps for e-mail would be a bad decision.)
There are times to weigh the pros and cons and there's not really any answer that says "always do this" for this area. For me, if I were to start a business, a lot of it would be hosted elsewhere - with a good site that I can trust, but elsewhere. I just don't have the time or resources to handle a dedicated server and all licensing costs. As the business grew, I'd probably investigate moving in-house, but it would be as things made sense to do that.
Hmm, seems like the answer is one of the favorite DBA responses - "It depends". 😀
October 8, 2008 at 7:29 am
We are running our startup using 37Signals' Basecamp project management tool and have been very productive. Our company is able to operate by only meeting once every two weeks. In fact, we were able to launched v2.0 of our site just a few days ago. It even includes some database related material:
[Plug]
Database design in termz of Business Intelligence
Database design in termz of Data warehousing
Database design in termz of Transaction Processing
Granted, we are a new company with less than 10 employees, but we are very impressed with how much can be done by "outsourcing" business functions. Having said that, there have been a few key situations in which we were hosting our own servers with complete control. This is still an ongoing issue for us.
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October 8, 2008 at 8:20 am
Depends where you are.
Not all places in the world have bandwidth that's sufficient for this kind of thing.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
October 8, 2008 at 8:49 am
having read some rather doom and gloom articles on how the whole cloud paradigm will signal the beginning of the end for databases Im quite pleased everyone seems so negative about the whole concept..,
but yes its my data I want to access and control it how and when I see fit not be at the mercy of the vaguires of bandwidth and as previously mentioned a poorly aimed workmans spade etc
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081003_005424.html
October 8, 2008 at 10:12 am
Security and all technical details can be overcome. What I think can not be overcome is relationships. What happens if you and the vendor holding your data has a falling out? People can get very vindictive. Or if you one month can't afford to pay your bills to the company holding you data? Are they going to lock you out? No thanks, I think I will keep my data local, or at least internally in my company.
October 8, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Excellent comments all around, I particularly like Gail's and Anders'.
For me, it's about bandwidth and control. The area I live in just got a second set of circuits for internet access, so I might be a little more resilient to hungry backhoes. I have zero interest in the iPhone because AT&T doesn't have service where my wife lives. But I own my data, and I'm not sure that I trust anyone to host it for me. There's the relationship issue, what happens to my data if I get embroiled in a legal dispute with the host or an associate of the host?
But for a small business who doesn't have, or can't afford, the technical expertise to have their own servers? Perhaps it's a good methodology. But they have to know of and accept the consequences if a hungry backhoe attacks them or their ISP or a configuration issue preventing access to their data. GMail and their online office suite suffered some pretty heavy hits in the last month or so and a lot of people got burned, having staked their reputation to going to hosted services.
Web sites come and go. How many music stores have gone away, taking their DRM servers with them, bricking people's music? Granted, Google is unlikely to go away, but Microsoft has proved fickle in the past, and Google has done some things that I don't care for that have tarnished their "do no evil" mantra.
I have no problem with my web site being hosted by a provider, but otherwise, I'll take responsibility for my own data, thenkyewveddymuch. If a backhoe eats my circuit, I can still be productive, I just can't be online.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
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