Moving to the Cloud is Creative Destruction
A recent article in "the economist" magazine questioned the value of the public cloud altogether. This took place in the Schumpeter section nonetheless. Joseph Schumpeter the economist most identified with capitalism’s creative destruction was transformed into what Peter F. Drucker refers to as a bean counter when it comes to the cloud. This kind of article and thinking will reinforce Information Technology’s old guard’s skepticism of all things new and especially the cloud. At the heart of the article is relating a blog post from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz using the example of how Dropbox managed to save billions and increase stock market valuation by repatriating the public cloud resources to its own datacenters. Indeed, as the theory and studies show there are cases where private on-premises deployments can be more cost-effective than the public cloud (as can be viewed in this lecture on cloud computing from the University of Illinois and Coursera). The tru...