I am traveling right now and this morning, on one of the flights ("in the cloud") I was reading a longer article about cloud computing and its adoption in the SMB market (small and medium businesses). Then, suddenly, it dawned on me. I, as a daddy, can be compared to a business critical application.
As a "traditional daddy", I am home quite often. My wife and kids have direct access to me and can (more or less) control what's going on - all at a price. I need food (chocolate, coffee, etc.), I need some care, sometimes there are outages or my family runs into "defects" that I have. Anyway, they like this "traditional daddy" and local hosting.
As "daddy in the cloud" I am available over the Internet and over the phone. Sometimes, my kids are that busy that they don't care whether they talk with daddy in person or over the phone. "Daddy in the cloud" is also cheaper than the "traditional daddy" because IBM is paying for the food. My wife has to cook less, has to buy less. There is less usage of water at home. All is good, except "daddy in the cloud" does not have all the extras of "traditional daddy". There are also questions about who can listen in to chats (on the phone or the Internet). Sometimes there are issues with scalability (customer needs daddy, family needs daddy - but only one daddy is available). Is this still an exclusive daddy or can others gain access to it...?
What is needed is "daddy as a service" with a service level agreement (SLA). However, based on the requirements, it will be hard to meet the SLA given that I can't beam back and forth...