The future is in the clouds. After seeing what cloud computing can do, I don't see how small and medium businesses will be able to compete without leveraging it in the not-so-distant future.
Interestingly, the main excuse everyone gives in not adopting a public cloud infrastructure is that it's "not secure". But that tells me there is real opportunity there for those that can solve that problem. Having my interest peaked by some consulting I did for a client trying to decide between building a conventional datacenter for his new business or hosting in the cloud, I enrolled in a course on Udemy to learn more about AWS (Amazon Web Services).
The course was taught by Ryan Kroonenburg and it was geared to achieving the AWS Associate Solutions Architect certification. Ryan is very knowledgeable on the subject and his hands-on training methods were very helpful in preparing for the exam, and I couldn't have passed without it.
While it was great to gain that certification, the greater value was the opening of my eyes to the possibilities of the cloud (particularly Amazon's offering) in scalability, automation, and flexibility. Rather than build out a datacenter with massive upfront costs, businesses can now pay a monthly fee to use what they need, scale up or down as needed and cancel the whole thing at a moments-notice with no penalty.
Wow. Anybody with any kind of lean experience is drooling over the low cost build-measure-learn that can be done in that type of environment.
Coming back to the idea of security, I'm not completely sold on that being a good excuse for not utilizing the cloud. It seems most of the issues I read about are misconfigurations by the user and not the fault of AWS.
I just really hate to see good technology being avoided because everyone is too scared to use it, and that sounds like the case here.
So, I'll end with a few questions that I'd love to hear feedback on:
Is the challenge with the cloud securing it, or convincing people it's secure?
Is the cloud intrinsically insecure, or is it still a human issue?
Send me your thoughts at chris@chrisbedel.com
