Cloudy with a chance of overspending

I’ve been getting some questions recently.

“Why has Sandy been hammering on the people choosing Public Cloud so bad!”

“Has he changed his name from Sandy Antipas to Sandy AntiCloud?”

Not yet, anyway.?

It’s not that I’m AntiCloud, it’s quite the opposite, I think Public Cloud is perfect for various workloads.?However, not everything needs to be in the Public Cloud.?To make this understood, I talk to people about a view that has changed over the years.?Data is the new Gold/Oil.?That metaphor doesn’t work for people who never owned large quantities of Gold or Oil, I mean we sort of get it, but it’s not a personal experience.

Instead, think of data like water.?It’s everywhere but there’s only a certain amount of it that we drink.?Right now you have your drinking water in your flash fridge and your taps are connected to the local water tank.?To use it, you just turn a tap on and you’re golden.

Public Cloud is like flash new Harry proposing high-tech secure water towers but overseas.?It’s still water but from their flash harry water towers.?Now they can do some pretty cool things with your water.?Add bubbles and any flavour you want and the best thing about it is it will be cheap to store your water there (and you get charged small amounts to use your water which is charged per litre)

What will happen is that in your Water transformation, you will have more attention in moving to the new flash Harry water tower that you forget what the water is for.

If you’re storing water you are doing that to make precious resources available for everyone to use.

We know that when a disaster strikes we need 10 litres of water a day per person as a minimum, so using that as a minimum what are the calculations per day per person you calculated for your data use?

I’m not Anti Public Cloud, I just want the smart people to remember why they are storing data.?Data is only useful when you can use it.?Egress billing does not make data use willing.