In 1999 when senior vice president Marc Benioff left Oracle to create Salesforce.com, many thought he was headed for a cliff at full steam but 10 years down the line, software as a service (SaaS) is a matured business model. Online productivity applications have joined the fray and are maturing at a brisk pace (Say Google Docs, Zoho).
In our modern enterprise, the database is a corner of most of the software architecture and I ask myself, will the database move into the cloud too? Will I be able to implement applications and point it to a database somewhere unknown?
The benefits are obvious – zero hardware configurations, zero backups (hey, I could spend a million dollars for that!), titanium grade security protection, etc. But should things fail, I have loss of data staring me in the face. With that I could get a jail time or be bankrupt depending on what data is missing.
These are interesting times.