During the 2025 election campaign, prime minister Mark Carney made a striking admission about Canada’s dependence on U.S. tech companies. The Canadian government was in the process of choosing a partner for a 25-year cloud computing contract for the federal government. The contract’s length should have set off red flags of its own, but the…
There is a world of difference between self-hosting your personal life and, for example, the department of motor vehicles needing servers that benefit from economies of scale.
Well companies can also have their own servers. It would even be better than relying on a third party where when the company does a mistake then all their clients (other companies) are affected. The Cloudstrike bug would be a good example of that.
That’s just not practical for a lot of businesses. Offloading the capex, operational costs and other hassles to a service provider makes a lot of sense for most companies.
Depends on what you need, if you’re a small business you won’t need much and it won’t cost as much as if you’d run a big business. Anyway, the whole point was to be more self reliant, how is being self reliant a bad thing? Why should you give all your information and trust a third party with everything you have?
They don’t need to go that far, I am just saying this is simple enough to do. Probably more complex for big corporations but the big corporations have the means to pay for their more complex system. As for small business this is simple enough. I am not saying they should build all their own hardware from scratch. And yes data is important and its better not to rely on some third party like I said what happened with cloudstrike affected so many and cost millions in damage. Same as so many company rely on Microsoft for everything. What’s so bad about not needing to trust another big corporation with all your data and your business?
It’s an ROI thing, as people are pointing out. You’re hand waving that part away. A small business has to weigh an small annual fee and loss of control against buying expensive hardware and paying the salary of one or more IT professionals to maintain their in house systems. This also scales with the size of the company and their data, it’s expensive for a small company to buy one or two servers and storage solutions, it’s expensive for a big company to buy 20 of the same.
You also lose out on off-site backups (without more investment of course) and global availability. Will every company that has a global team roll out servers in every global region? Small companies can have global teams as well.
It’s simply not cost effective for everyone to have their own infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure is the same as any other infrastructure, it is cheaper to pool resources and share
There is a world of difference between self-hosting your personal life and, for example, the department of motor vehicles needing servers that benefit from economies of scale.
Well companies can also have their own servers. It would even be better than relying on a third party where when the company does a mistake then all their clients (other companies) are affected. The Cloudstrike bug would be a good example of that.
That’s just not practical for a lot of businesses. Offloading the capex, operational costs and other hassles to a service provider makes a lot of sense for most companies.
I think you could easily hire people who do that job at your company or someone who maintain it at least or some contractors.
ok what do you think that costs? you’ve clearly given this a lot of thought to have such a strong opinion.
Depends on what you need, if you’re a small business you won’t need much and it won’t cost as much as if you’d run a big business. Anyway, the whole point was to be more self reliant, how is being self reliant a bad thing? Why should you give all your information and trust a third party with everything you have?
You’re treating data as a special unicorn. Why don’t companies manufacture their own computers? Why don’t they build their own delivery vans?
They don’t need to go that far, I am just saying this is simple enough to do. Probably more complex for big corporations but the big corporations have the means to pay for their more complex system. As for small business this is simple enough. I am not saying they should build all their own hardware from scratch. And yes data is important and its better not to rely on some third party like I said what happened with cloudstrike affected so many and cost millions in damage. Same as so many company rely on Microsoft for everything. What’s so bad about not needing to trust another big corporation with all your data and your business?
It’s an ROI thing, as people are pointing out. You’re hand waving that part away. A small business has to weigh an small annual fee and loss of control against buying expensive hardware and paying the salary of one or more IT professionals to maintain their in house systems. This also scales with the size of the company and their data, it’s expensive for a small company to buy one or two servers and storage solutions, it’s expensive for a big company to buy 20 of the same.
You also lose out on off-site backups (without more investment of course) and global availability. Will every company that has a global team roll out servers in every global region? Small companies can have global teams as well.
It’s simply not cost effective for everyone to have their own infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure is the same as any other infrastructure, it is cheaper to pool resources and share
And for economies of scale and reliability and flexibility they could start pooling their computing together and then