cloud is really about getting your data away from your own network For startups and individuals, i.e. those that usually don’t have millions to spend on datace

cloud is really about getting your data away from your own network For startups and individuals, i.e. those that usually don’t have millions to spend on datacentre infrastructure, this is the case. However, large corporations like banks and multinationals can easily afford their own data centres at multiple locations around the globe, and so already have a solution for better redundancy and lower downtime. I think that the 'cloud' concept to them is about moving data from a fragmented set of desktops and file shares to an internal cloud rather than moving data off their network all together. This allows them to yield the benefits of the cloud (data consolidated, employee access from anywhere on their network, virtual workstations, easier distributed working) without the perceived disadvantages (data ownership and security). M$ have obviously realised this and made a shrewd move that makes use of their existing Office market share (they can claim ‘skill reuse’ when marketing the product and capitalise on the Office brand). I agree Sharepoint is awful but the sad truth is that the senior managers that make these type of decisions barely use the software, will just see the feature list and trust a brand like M$ over the other solutions out there that work perfectly (and sometimes better) for the rest of us. This is just one of the reasons why enterprise software usually sucks.