Mar
5
Whether Clouds or?
March 5, 2010 | 8 Comments
I was keen on using the Ghost service, a “cloud-based” virtual desktop environment I planned to use for my daughter’s school science project. That was until I got this message in my in-box recently -
Dear Ghost User,
We hope you have been enjoying our free Ghost service. Regrettably changes in the marketplace mean that it is no longer economical for us to host the Ghost service and we will be closing down the service on or around March 15. We will instead be focusing on licensing or selling our technology to larger companies.
etc etc
Yikes. So much for a new frontier…
Cloud computing is one of the hot topics on the tech agenda over the last few years but candidly I thought we would be further along. Because of all the issues around security, privacy and switching costs, not to mention the questionable ROI at this time, I’ve had trouble thinking about migrating our infrastructure to the Cloud. In that I would appear to not be alone.
Making money in the Cloud space still appears illusive. According to Silicon Alley Insider, even Microsoft is struggling with it. Check out the performance of Microsoft Online Services Division, of which Infrastructure Services is a part:
While I still have ROI and security concerns surrounding the model I still feel it’s the future. It just seems the future isn’t arriving as fast as I thought it would.