With the recent Gmail “failure” there has been lots of talk about whether we are really ready for Cloud Computing.  Is 99.9% availability good enough?  An interesting question.  But that made me think of a much more practical question, “Are we ready for in-house IT?”

Can your company handle:

• Regular, planned outages for monthly maintenance?
• Irregular, unplanned outages due to non-redundant architecture?
• Your IT inner workings understood by 2-3 elite engineers and few others?
• Large upfront capital costs?
• Large recurring expenses?
• The joy of Microsoft Enterprise Agreements?
• Non-existent business continuity plans?
• Long upgrade cycles?
• Paying very talented people to be experts in SAN architecture and virtualization, while your company’s core competency is really real estate or accounting or some other non-IT related field?
• Worrying about resource management as each new user requires more disk space and licenses?
• etc.

I know Cloud Computing has some drawback (lack of control being drawback #1), but in-house IT is hardly a walk in the park.  And for the sake of argument, I am not talking about IT in companies of 5,000 people or more.   I am talking about small to mid-sized businesses and the real risks they carry each and every day by *not* moving to Cloud Computing.