Andrew Meredith

Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK

Engineer

The cloud is just a strategy by the big hosting (and related) companies to try and distract attention from the fact that you no longer need to hive anything all off to them.

Now that you can buy a machine with the power of an old mainframe for a few hundred squids and the operating system to implement the services is free, businesses can do it for themselves. Self hosting, not cloud computing would be the sensible choice for the future.

Add to this, a self hosted machine will not be subject to the kind of state sponsored comms surveillance our present government seems to find irresistible when communicating with another self hosted box. The company (or individual) will own and control the whole shooting match. Any state snooping will require a properly authorised search warrant.