A few days ago I attended a company's free presentation, where they extolled the benefits of living in the cloud versus keeping a server under the kitchen table.
Over the last 20 years, I myself have gone through the bumpy road of external hard drives, CDs, then DVDs, USB flash drives, NAS, rented storage, POP3 versus IMAP email, until three years ago one Christmas I finally took the trouble and started moving all of the company's data into Google G Suite.
I don't regret it.
What was really strange about this talk was, why does this even need so much discussion? Why do company leaders need so much convincing to listen to their common sense instead of their system administrator?
As I started going through my acquaintances and the (multinational) companies we work for, I realized that the situation really is depressing.
Centralized systems that can't be accessed from outside, unusable email programs (Lotus Notes), countless applications with a total lack of integration, Office and other programs lagging at least three versions behind, Skype, Dropbox, shared Excel files and huge disorder in the folders.
And covering all of this is a sweet feeling, like icing on the cake, that our data is safe because it's with us, no one can steal it, no one can see it, because we protect it ourselves!
Dear business leaders, acquaintances and strangers! Do you get paid in cash? Do you keep your money in cash, at home in a piggy bank?
Since bank money has existed, the cloud has existed too, and yet the money hasn't been lost.
Google, for example, safeguards the data of 2,000,000,000 users, and do we know of a single photo ever getting lost? No, we don't.
Do you know of any Excel file that stores the entire history of every single cell while any number of you can edit it at the same time? No, you don't.
Is 1800 HUF per month per user a lot of money? No, it's not.
It seems we'll remain a nation of system administrators for a long time yet, instead of spending our time on more useful things.
