my Anticloud Point of View...

A recent email from Microsoft announcing another price hike inspired me to write this blog. In the last two years, I saw a 67 percent hike in subscription charges of G-Suite. Whether you agree or not to such price hikes, your dependency created over a period of time does not leave you with any choice.

Also, the service outage we see with these stalwarts is a matter of concern. We suffered a blanket service outage a couple of times last month with G-Suite. Microsoft or AWS is no better.

In current pandemic times, the anywhere availability of data and applications is a new normal. Cloud resellers are mushrooming. There are too many options. I am writing this blog to help enterprise leaders understand caution points and alternatives.

Service Level Agreements

Do you remember the terms of agreement you agreed to while signing up for AWS, G-Suite, MS365, DropBox, or whatever? They are one-sided. You agree that you cannot hold them responsible in the event of any loss, breach, leakage, or theft of your digital assets. There is no clarity on compensation for any downtime. We all noticed it during the down-time we faced with service providers. Such too defensive SLAs are unfair and oligopolistic.

Dependency as an Exit Barrier

All is good when you get married and until you remain married. Imagine all the digital assets of your enterprise is with the cloud service provider, and you want to migrate to another service provider or go back to on-premise. It could be for better features, cost-effectiveness, security concerns, or disagreement with the price hike. Here is the reality check. Most of these service providers do not have smooth migration tools. Some of them impose unreasonable charges to getting back your own data and even cite the impossibility of migration due to policy reasons. Any hiccups during the migration process, you sense a lack of cooperation. How does it feel? It feels like dragging a failed marriage, and you have to live with it.

PUPM v/s PEPM

Per User Per Month is the buzzword, and that's where these stalwarts are fascinated. Subscriber base gives them crazy valuations. Why can't it be PEPM, Per Enterprise Per Month? How about your enterprise getting a pool of storage for all its users, software environment, and security as an enterprise? For example, Microsoft offers 1 TB for each user on OneDrive. You have 50 users, and the total size of digital assets of your enterprise is 8 TB. You should get 8 TB as an enterprise and should not pay for something you don't use.

Data Security

Anywhere availability of your applications and digital assets like designs, drawings, emails, cost sheets, customer data, research documents makes your enterprise vulnerable to Data Leakage and Theft by internal employees. Most cloud resellers don't talk about it. Imagine you migrate all your digital assets and applications to the cloud resulting in anywhere availability of data and applications. How will you ensure that this data and application is accessible on specific devices? How will you make sure that employees cannot copy, leak, steal, share, or misuse this data access for competitive exploitation or commercial benefit? The cloud resellers do not have an answer to this question.

Private Cloud is not AntiCloud

Enterprises need to look at a niche segment of private cloud providers. On behalf of your enterprise, they invest in hardware, networking, and security infrastructure, host it in world-class data centers, and power them with ample bandwidth. They can offer enterprise-grade solutions in sync with an enterprise's data loss - leakage - theft prevention objectives. You get to discuss your concerns with the experts and get solutions compared to the Do It Yourself type of service model by DropBox, AWS, MS365, G-Suite. I see immense potential for Virtual Private Cloud providers who can prove to be the game changers for the Enterprises that want their Cloud Partner to be accountable for security and business continuity.

Do reply to me if you want to explore further. I can help.

Best Regards,

Vishal Shah

Founder and CEO,

Synersoft Technologies Private Limited