Similar to Microsoft cutting off access to the email server at the International Criminal Court. We need to get our shit together.
If software is a service, then service can be denied at any time. Host your own infrastructure, and reclaim digital ownership.
That goes for large businesses and individuals.
My company spent last decade automating moving entire organizations and all their software to the cloud. This decade weve been automating moving entire organizations off the cloud. Sometimes to private clouds but most of the time to on prem hardware just like the old n times.
So many were sold a magical fairytale of huge cost savings and reliability but were greated with an entirely different reality.
Whoever decides to trust Microsoft will always get burned. Amazon and Google not much better.
Yep, i’ve seen this exact pattern at three diffrent companies - the cloud repatriation movement is gaining serious momentum as CFOs finally see the true long-term costs versus the initial promises.
Yeah, it is very important to consider how dependant you are on third parties. At the very least the more dependence the more power they have over you. But also how screwed you are if they just go under.
- If you use SaaS they can interrupt your use at any time and you can only react (for example demanding a reversal or lawsuits).
- If you host closed source software they can’t interrupt service on an existing contract but can legally require you to stop using it if they don’t renew the contract. (And if the company goes under you can likely get away with using the software as long as it doesn’t need code fixes.)
- If the software is open source you can continue using the software indefinitely including making code fixes. (Maintenance may be expensive as it is now your problem but that can be costed and an exit plan made if required.)
Idk I wonder how abrupt this actually was. Russia sanctions have been happening for a while.
One extreme defensive move for an enterprise would be to implement full redundancy for anything not hosted on-premises. Redundancy for data protection is relatively straightforward, but having multiple email, supply chain, or e-commerce services is very expensive and disruptive. What are the odds that it would even be needed? Whatever those odds were, they just became much higher.
This is simply dumb. The odds are greater than zero. you must have a disaster plan. It sucks that MS did this but I don’t have much sympathy for anyone that decided to save money by ignoring DR.
Especially a utility of all things.
Critical Dependency As A Service
For when you need to outsource the potential crippling of your business to potentially hostile third parties.
