Nephophobia and Outsourcing

Did you notice that HootSuite was down last week? Did you want to edit an entry on Reddit but could not? Well, you weren't alone. Amazon recently experienced major problems with its Elastic Compute Cloud service, affecting many sites across a wide variety of industries. This sparked a debate over the future of cloud computing.

Here are my two cents on the matter: Yes, the outages represented a mild inconvenience to me and many others. What's more, they were much worse for the many small businesses that rely upon Amazon to run the crux of their businesses. However, many cloud naysayers were waiting for something like this to happen to justify their nephophobia (fear of clouds) and general aversion to change.

Many software vendors and old school organizations have been slow to embrace cloud computing because of often misplaced security, reliability, and control issues. They have spent millions of dollars configuring their on-premises CRM and ERP systems. While their infrastructures are not optimal, they have little incentive to rock the boat. Many want clouds to simply go away so they can protect their fiefdoms.