Then why do enterprises insist on trying to create their own banks (data centers)?
I have been thinking a while about on-premises data centers vs cloud data centers, and this analogy came to mind…
We trust our money with banks, financial institutions.. Instead of keeping our money at home in a safe or mattress. Yes some people have safes with valuables but I’m guessing they don’t direct deposit their paycheck to their safe. People also use the bank safety deposit boxes for valuables – usually the most important things like passports, birth certs, etc!
Why do we try to make our own data centers? Host our servers and apps? Shouldn’t we trust the banks (cloud providers)? Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc? I think we should.
I think if we step back and think about it we wouldn’t be trying to recreate banks when there are banks out there. My guess is back when banks were starting out, maybe the safe makers and maintenance guys didn’t want it to happen? Or maybe they figured out how to make better safes in banks instead of houses.
Photo Credit: Myself on a bike ride last week.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 
6 replies on “If Data Is Your Currency…”
Makes sense to me
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I’ve posed this question. The response I get, it’s just a matter of when. Right now cloud providers are unwilling to back what they say and have the ability to deal with a customer that is a heavy regulated industry. However, we have something like 50+ cloud based resources we use, just not our core.
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Banks guarantee 100% of your money up to a certain amount.
Hosting companies guarantee a number of nines for data safety, but not 100%. (And I’m not talking downtime, I’m talking outright data loss.) They’re also not liable if you lose data.
Because of this guarantee, banks are safer in terms of data loss than keeping your money at home in a mattress. However, the opposite can hold true with internal systems – you may actually be better off with higher internal SLAs than you can get externally. (Granted, some folks have no internal SLAs, in which case they’re screwed too.)
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maybe we need FDIC for Cloud Hosting then?
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Nah, because part of the attraction of cloud hosting is the price reductions. Government regulation won’t help this race to the bottom – it’d have the opposite effect.
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Well, data isn’t always the currency: in many cases, it’s productivity. Data is useless if you can’t get to it in a timely, reliable fashion. Things like warehouse scanners, networking equipment, and even local PCs require quick, highly reliable access to the data.
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