I’ve been in enterprise IT for decades, with friends in SMB IT, and we often discuss the ongoing migration of enterprise grade stuff (hardware, software, processes, paradigms, etc) to the SMB space.
Some is good (like management/leadership, team building, etc. You know, the soft skills in this article). Other stuff can be problematic. Cloud-everything for example. Vendors (looking at you, MS), have painted SMB into a corner with licensing so cloud looks much more attractive.
What SMB management often ignores is now your business can be held hostage by your cloud provider, who, while they may claim your data is encrypted, are certainly surveilling everything that isn’t. When they decide to raise rates, or remove features, what are you going to do?
God, I’d love to create a competitor to Quickbooks in the OSS space.
It’s off-topic for this thread, but as a fellow IT professional, the incessant push to cloud-ify everything is frustrating as hell. It’s like all concepts of “does this make sense for my use case?” no longer exist. Cloud is NOT always better, and I’d argue that in many instances, it is just plain worse than going with a local, on-prem solution.
We’re very much on the same page. Seeing the SMB’s get sucked into cloud because on-prem has hardware costs is really frustrating. I blame bean-counter, because hardware is a capital expenditure and cloud is like leasing something.
The short-term financials look good, but disregards the risks and costs of going to cloud. That my SMB IT friends don’t make this more clear to their clients is really frustrating.
Backup is a great use-case for cloud, you address the risk of local problems, so I get that. But office 365/email/outlook? No thanks. But MS just makes it so much cheaper/easier, especially for SMB.
Agreed on all points. Backup is indeed often a great candidate for cloud. Like you said, it’s usually cheaper and safer in the long run and addresses all the checklist items you’d have to implement locally for redundancies and security.
All these vendors forcing us to move to a rent based economy is tiresome.
Yep.
I’ve been in enterprise IT for decades, with friends in SMB IT, and we often discuss the ongoing migration of enterprise grade stuff (hardware, software, processes, paradigms, etc) to the SMB space.
Some is good (like management/leadership, team building, etc. You know, the soft skills in this article). Other stuff can be problematic. Cloud-everything for example. Vendors (looking at you, MS), have painted SMB into a corner with licensing so cloud looks much more attractive.
What SMB management often ignores is now your business can be held hostage by your cloud provider, who, while they may claim your data is encrypted, are certainly surveilling everything that isn’t. When they decide to raise rates, or remove features, what are you going to do?
God, I’d love to create a competitor to Quickbooks in the OSS space.
It’s off-topic for this thread, but as a fellow IT professional, the incessant push to cloud-ify everything is frustrating as hell. It’s like all concepts of “does this make sense for my use case?” no longer exist. Cloud is NOT always better, and I’d argue that in many instances, it is just plain worse than going with a local, on-prem solution.
We’re very much on the same page. Seeing the SMB’s get sucked into cloud because on-prem has hardware costs is really frustrating. I blame bean-counter, because hardware is a capital expenditure and cloud is like leasing something.
The short-term financials look good, but disregards the risks and costs of going to cloud. That my SMB IT friends don’t make this more clear to their clients is really frustrating.
Backup is a great use-case for cloud, you address the risk of local problems, so I get that. But office 365/email/outlook? No thanks. But MS just makes it so much cheaper/easier, especially for SMB.
Agreed on all points. Backup is indeed often a great candidate for cloud. Like you said, it’s usually cheaper and safer in the long run and addresses all the checklist items you’d have to implement locally for redundancies and security.
All these vendors forcing us to move to a rent based economy is tiresome.