>>>Cloud sounds rosey when the spin doctors are pushing it. Bottom line is this puts a continuous revenue stream to the providers and a continuous expense to the customers.
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>Whereas your own servers and OS/database licenses are a one-off expense for ever and ever? ;-)
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>IMHO it's like a maintenance lease on a car. For 3 years you get effective ownership and full maintenance for a set price, deferring the full capital cost forever. It's a popular way to manage expensive kit.
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>>>Oops.. Internet connection is down? Go home.
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>Fair enough. Or you could get a Draytek duan WAN router that automatically falls over to mobile broadband if the cable/DSL fails. I've used a service that effectively is cloud for years and the only significant outage was when a widespread power cut lasted long enough to drain the generator's fuel. That sort of disaster can strike your own servers, except that there won't be a legion of techos trying to get it going again overnight at no cost to you.

There are many towns here where the internet access, even the business accounts which are much more expensive, are still not reliable. They go up and down. They guarantee someone on-site within 24 hours. That's fine for a once a year outage (if you have a means to work disconnected), but not when it is 2-3 times a month at least.

When I was working in the insurance industry, those companies that only had web access for writing policies lost some business whenever that happened. Typically people shopping for insurance at those times were in a hurry and would go with a policy with a company that had a client-side app to write the policies so they wouldn't have to wait. Some companies were better at having a means to write a policy while disconnected, but some were not. It's gotten better, but still not great and not across the board.