When I joined Confio 3.7 years ago I was the only remote employee. I can count on one hand the number of times I have used VPN to get back into the network. Everything we do is cloud based.

I definitely agree that not all data needs to be hosted on site. My main point there was about data that needs to be compliant (and probably data that works with that compliant data) will likely need local hosting or better security options than are currently available in the Cloud.

Being a U-Verse user, bandwidth is definitely a concern for me as I gaze longingly at the FIOS speeds that are forever out of reach unless I move. However, latency does play into some of my concerns. We’re going across a pretty fat pipe to our data center, but it’s across the country so latency is high. With SQL being very chatty, it means my local tools are less useful than tools hosted in that data center. I think that will get better with time as well, but right now it _could_ be another consideration.

Overall, I’m in agreement with you about using those cloud services. If I were just starting up, I’d likely move that way because I wouldn’t have to buy a ton of hardware to get things started. Virtualize, deploy, publish, and hopefully profit. 🙂

Yes, agreed, exciting times are ahead!

Back when Al Gore was just an internet founder and fighting disconnected people before he moved on to putting ice back at the poles – the internet was started by universities, government labs, etc. creating a wide area network… Well today the government is working on a high speed network linking these same type of installations and their super computers.. A bit 10Gbps WAN.. I imagine by the time my kids are college aged there will be a lot more of this in the public domain.. Neat project – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Research_and_Engineering_Network

Those people always get what’s coming to them one way or another, but it is sad. Agreed, great post, very interesting discussions coming from it. Great way to get our brains back in action early on this year.