Politics, Religion and the Cloud

Three weeks ago, a small business owner told me she had gone $20,000 into debt buying hardware to run their website. She and her partners run a catering business and their new web site is a combination of brochure and ordering portal. "We've been in business for 8 years. This is the first time we had to borrow money" she told me.

There was simply no reason that this site needed to run on the a dedicated pair of physical servers in a colocation facility with a 3 year lease. I told her that they could have used Joyent.

"What about security?" she asked. I told her we have e-commerce companies like Gilt Groupe doing hundreds of millions in transactions through applications that run on the Joyent cloud.

"Why did my IT guys say no to the cloud?" The short answer: Politics and religion.

It's the politics of defending budgets. It's the unreasonable attachment to old technology pursed with a passion that borders on dogmatic.

There are bigger political issues too. Computing infrastructure, like green technology, is a matter of national pride in some parts of the world. Leaders are right to see cloud as the ideal innovation engine. Entrepreneurs can try out new ideas without having to raise $20K. In my years at Joyent, I have seen multi-million dollar businesses built without capital. Instead, these businesses have started small and scaled up only when they needed to. It's simple business advice: Keep all your costs variable, stay profitable.

Are there bigger religious issues? There is certainly an ethical one. Those guys did the wrong thing when they advised a small business to spend $20 thousand on hardware when the company would have been fine with a cloud based solution that costs $250 a month.

Most of the time at Joyent, we think about things from the perspective of what's the new, cool technology. But it's unexpected conversations with entrepreneurs running small companies that highlight the massive impact such cool technology can actually have.



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