Judging by how cloud services "frequently" go down when everything is normal, it makes me wonder what would happen in case of a real problem (volcano eruption, social unrest, nuclear disaster, alien invasion ...).
I still don't get the cloud infatuation, and no you don't have to get off my lawn, I'm "only" 36 (yeah I know, in IT I'm already a dinosaur).
What would happen to your own datacenter in case of a similar disaster? Your servers would go down and you would spin up from your disaster recovery site. Cloud doesn't mean you don't need a DR plan anymore.
Put your servers in different regions, use Azure/Google, BlueMix/AWS, or even hybrid cloud, do something. Have a DR plan.
I'm thinking as the little guy here : not data center but personal computers.
If the disaster strikes my region, I probably have better things to do than IT things (like running for my life :-).
But with the cloud the disaster could be thousand of kilometers away and still affect me. That's the problem with the cloud : why should I stop working in my remote French town because there's a landslide in Ireland (or wherever they put the European cloud data centers) ?
I don't say the cloud doesn't have it's uses (especially as a redundant backup far far away) but the all cloud model has way more risks than what people think ... and vendors don't rush to explain that.
I'm one of those guy that think the future will be more and more harsh for the western civilization (think collapse of the Soviet Union). There will be less money for everything, infrastructure in particular, things will fail and you will have to deal with it locally and the DIY way.
We used to have a locked "oh shit" box. I was supposed to put our DR (which we did actually have) and a host of other things in it (it was suggested we even put a loaded gun in it) to get by with in the case of a total disaster. We were supposed to then ship it off to Iron Mountain. That oh shit box sat empty for years on the premises...
