Duffbert's Random Musings

1 - We're safe for two years. After all, this administration would never try to restrain political speech.

Oh wait...

2 - If you ask any USA cloud vendor, I will bet they will tell you "it could never happen here (or to your data)." Uh, riiiight. I'm sure that's what someone told those Egyptian companies.

3 - Tom,

Surprised you singled out only IBM since all the major players tout cloud data centers. Your statement is reminiscent of the one sided political arguments from media pundits pushing their own agenda. Are you inferring that the only safe way to implement messaging and collaboration is internally? That's interesting since many companies rely on the intertubes to connect different geographic sites of the same company. I'm sure you you have a more in depth inference here but the brevity of the post leaves thoughtful people to wonder. I'm not blowing sunshine up IBM's arse and If you know my current situation you'd know how true that is. Have a great Lotusphere! I'll be up here in the cold trying to keep the snow from swallowing my driveway.

4 - @4... you read far more into it than I ever intended. The general point is that throwing your data into the cloud, while "cheaper", may end up costing you far more in the long run. The cloud has to exist somewhere, and quite often you're never sure exactly where your data resides in the world. For all I know, my Google mail lives in China and my Yahoo mail lives in the Philippines. And if public unrest causes a country to restrict or shut down internet access, you as a business might walk in Monday morning to find yourself out of business, which is likely a risk you never counted on when vendor X sold you on cheap email for $5 per person per month.

And the reason I mentioned IBM is that my IBM Google News alerts of the last week have had numerous references to the new data center IBM is building in China. I *could* have substituted any vendor in there. But IBM was the most current vendor publicly announcing a major new data center in a different country, and China is often cited as a potential source of "cyber-warfare", which could make restricted internet access between the US and China a possibility.

5 - IT and how you apply it should be a differentiator for your Company. Why you would want to outsource that capability is beyond me. I have yet to see anything that would convince me that the Cloud is a good idea.
No, I'm not in IT.