Will 'unclouding' take the channel by storm?
CRN's Doug Woodburn asks whether a backlash is gathering against the economics of public cloud?
We are repeatedly told that cloud is cheaper, more flexible and more secure than its dinosaur predecessor on-premise.
And that any reseller or MSP who doesn't embrace cloud isn't long for this world.
Even in this week's issue of CRN, we feature a comment from NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, who claimed companies that don't embrace cloud will be dead in five years.
The rise of AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure has been so rapid that analyst Canalys warned at its Channels Forum this month against the dangers of the trio becoming "too big to fail" (see this week's Spotlight on [asset_library_tag 10488,p6-7]).
Against a backdrop of almost hysterical pro-cloud rhetoric, anyone in our industry arguing it's not all it's cracked up to be risks being labelled a proverbial King Canute.
Despite this, a public cloud backlash appears to be gathering pace.
‘Unclouding' is a growing phenomenon, these cloud sceptics argue, particularly with the rise of hyper-converged infrastructure promising cloud-like functionality on-premise.
Storage VAR Epaton is one such sceptic, and its boss Jonathan Lassman is among those convinced that the economics of public cloud - at least for firms with more than 100 users - no longer stack up, if they ever did.
As an example, an online firm Epaton is currently talking to spends £20,000 a month on cloud backup, equivalent to £1.25m over five years, when the equivalent for an on-premise solution would cost £500,000, Lassman said.
"IT is a deliverable for the business and it's therefore about doing the best we can at the best price. Anyone who thinks it's about anything else has lost the plot," he said, proving there are two sides to every debate.
Yes, cloud-based storage and compute is outgrowing on-premise - and will continue to do so - but it's interesting that we're hearing more and more murmurings from sceptics convinced the economics of moving to public cloud don't always stack up.