American Airlines Grounded by iPads

[Sir Moody]

Yes, I'm aware of the problem - reading over your post I see that the main plank of your argument is cost. Now, cost is certainly important, even for the military, but the reality is that reliability is much more important for something life this, and the ongoing cost of renting the service is usually more than the cost of running it yourself, certainly for something like a large airline. Reliability is also not great - going back to the military thing - I once stood guard in a guardroom with a broken armoury alarm. That meant that it was impossible to know if someone was braking into the armoury, it was an old camp without CCTV. Why was it broken? Because the German-based company the British Army was renting their own camp from hadn't fixed it.

You really underestimate how much Clouds cost to build and operate - these are MASSIVE arrays of very powerful computers which require constant cooling.

Think about it this way for second - you run a Business which requires a large amount of computing power 5 days a week - if you buy your own machines 2 days a week you will be paying upkeep on machines you are not using. If you Rent you pay for what you use.

On reliability - if you buy the machines you have to maintain the hardware, the area that houses the hardware, the network that the machines are connected into and all software installed.
If you are renting you have a company that is reliant on the cloud working to make its money at your beck and call to make sure everything is Ok... all you need to do is make sure your internal network can contact the external cloud.

so on the Rent side of things it is both A) far cheaper and B) far more reliable.

The only benefit you can gain from controlling your own cloud is the security of knowing all data is handled in house - you would be surprised by the number of business that don't care about that... especially when you consider how difficult and expensive it is to maintain a secure network as Sony as found out...