Municipalities Minimize Downtime By Moving To Cloud-Based Solutions
In yet another example of the "the cloud" moving from marketing hype to enterprise solution, the City of San Francisco is upgrading its email system to Microsoft's cloud-based solution. In a recent Cnet.com article the city addressed two key concerns of most enterprises when it comes to cloud based solutions.
Loss of Control 
This is a common objection. For instance, what happens during downtime? In such a situation a business is at the mercy of the cloud vendor. Surely this is a big problem. Or is it? From the article:
Recently, Microsoft's cloud-based customers suffered an e-mail outage. E-mail outages have happened before, but this time the outage affected the city for only four hours, Walton said. "The Microsoft outage showed us we made the right decision" in picking Microsoft after considering using competitors such as Google and Lotus Notes, Walton said.
Simply put, outages occur with on-premise solutions as well, but more and more CIO's are willing to trust those outages with large vendors instead of internal staff.
Security Concerns
This is another big objection and a legitimate one. Again, from the article:
"...we were impressed by [Microsoft's] security solutions," Walton said. "Microsoft has clients that require more security than the city does."
To put it another way, can the City of San Fransicso do security better than a vendor like Microsoft with its vast resources and army of experts? Mostly likely not. Moving this headache to the cloud will allow the city's staff to focus more on its core business instead of being overwhelmed with system maintenance and updates.
This post is not meant to be an endorsement of any particular service or vendor. It is simply to point out the obvious; that the cloud is real and is here to stay. The cloud is not the be all and end all solution. However, there are some cloud technologies that just make sense because of the cost and complexity of on-premise solutions. Enterprise email immediately comes to mind along with CRM solutions and infrastructure monitoring services. The cloud is your friend, not your enemy.
Click here to view the full article from cnet.