Cloud computing?????

Don't think so. Here's why.

Cloud computing is a fancy name for hosted services which has been around for a long time. So someone came up with the idea to switch "hosted services" to "cloud computing" to push to the exec's. Sounds great, cost effective, 24/7 access. for any location, redundant systems, etc.. etc. etc. Please keep feeding me the BS. What sales people tell you and what is actual are almost 2 very different things, here is an example.

Exec's decided to move our e-mail systems to the "cloud" hosted by one of the top internet providers. They gave them the whole sales pitch so the decision was made to switch over. Went fine for a few months then problems started arising. Loss of connections, address book not updating, calender sync issues, and so on and so on. So who did they call for help? Not the providers of the hosted services but us the internal it team. So what did we do? after hanging on the phone for 2 hours we placed a ticket with the company and 2 weeks later the issue was resolved. Well some of the issues, the rest are in limbo until we called again and again waiting for them to get back us (which in most cases they never did) and when they did it was because of our persistence. Now if the I/T team responded with type of support i would be looking for another job right now.
But here is the kicker, turns out they didn't actually host the services themselves but contracted it out to another company and charged us a premium. And what a premium $50K a year. That enough to cover servers, failover systems, redundant links, licensing, backups well you get what i mean.

Welcome to the REAL world. Execs took the blue pill we took the red. (or vise versa, whatever)

PS. we did have a SLA agreement in place that was suppose to cover all this.