Comment Re:Licensing, Lack of Options, Screwing business a (Score 1) 406
Unfortunately I can't recommend cloud based products to my clients. Having a hard dependency on network connectivity to the internet is a non-starter for most people.
I agree with this. While it's nice, and I recommend cloud servers for a lot of use cases, office infrastructure is currently not one of them. My major issue is not that the ISPs are not reliable, cost effective, or secure.
My major issue is one of network connectivity. "Business class" broadband ISP offerings in the US are pretty awful, which is why I put business class in quotes. Either service or speed (and often both) are incompatible with business requirements. Talking to first (and often second) level support is pointless once you explain to them that you're trying to run an office of 4-5 developers utilizing a cloud-based configuration management, issue tracking, and continuous build environment.
Individual connections actually seem much better. If you're going to move to a cloud-based infrastructure for the above use case, it's probably better to have everyone work from home, access protected resources via VPN, and use a distributed configuration management model to minimize connectivity down time.
The push by Microsoft towards SkyDrive and Microsoft Live accounts is also a really bad decision for consumers given the state of broadband in the US. Who's to say that Microsoft won't shut down these services in the future when/if it's no longer profitable.