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Re: [LUG] Looking for old hardware

 


>> Thin clients seem rather redundant when we consider "cloud computing" & the Web.

> Isn't the whole point of "cloud computing" that you have a "thin client" ?

Kind of, but it's one of those terms that is so often abused it can mean everything 
- including running apps locally and keeping data remotely. It is a marketing term, 
after all.

Personally I have two significant issues with cloud computing.

1. My data is owned and controlled by somebody else. As has already happened, a 
cloud provider went bust, businesses relying on them lost access to their data. Add 
to that the risk of confidentiality being exposed and you have a fairly dangerous 
situation as far as control and access goes.

2. I live in devon. I manage data and IT for five distinct sites. Only one is within 
a town. Four have internet connections that are way below the national average, 
ranging between 1.0mbit down and 256 up, and 3.5/0.768. On that I struggle to serve 
basic web access to my users (using two outbounds at the busiest site). Modern adsl 
is actually quite reliable nowadays - far better than the isdn we had before - but 
it's far too slow to be putting our data out there. I host our own email too, which 
is great for keeping control, but does mean an admin and hardware overhead. But that 
said, I'm fairly sure I'd still like to keep control of it in my own hands even if 
we had the bandwidth to host it "out there somewhere".

There's no doubt cloudiness has its place, but anyone responsible for data should 
think very carefully before handing it over to someone else.

Si

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