The Connected Data / File Transporter presentation kicked off with a rather interesting look at the cloud computing market of today, more specifically the economics of public cloud and the other drawbacks it has. Many of us have seen “the cloud” grow over the past years and still, the marketing behind it is aggressive. Most industry events are still fully focused on “moving to the cloud”: EMC World 2015 was all about the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and how to move to it, companies I talk with still “want to move to the public cloud because unicorns” and if you open a random IT magazine you’ll see clouds every other page paragraph line.
Something I noticed the past couple of years is the big difference between the adoption of public cloud in the US versus Europe: I feel that the US is more eager to jump into a cloud than us Europeans. Sure, people use cloud services over here as well: I use Dropbox privately to share some files with friends and I also store some (garbage) emails at Gmail. Talk with a relatively small company and there’s a big chance they use some type of cloud service like Office365, just because the TCO of running that infrastructure for themselves doesn’t add up. But have that same conversation with a larger company and it’s a different story.