Quote Originally Posted by Jenner View Post
That's my concern too. Most companies internet connection are 100x to 1000x+ slower than their internal LAN speed. CAD on a cloud would be a joke with regular 40meg files, not to mention that in a CAD assembly, you might have 30 of these open at once (crawling over a 1Mbps T1 that shared with 30 other office employees? Ouch).

I could see source control too; but I work with some projects with resources upwards of 100Mb. At least good source control systems like Subversion only update to you the files that are different than your local copy. You'd only have to pull the painful 120Mb head version once.

Yea, I don't know how you'd handle large database transfers like inventory stock levels. Right now, we have small data-puller programs that update the off-site web system once a day at 5:30PM. It takes 10 minutes to pull the data, zip it, FTP it over, and update the database on the website with the new info. I could put the inventory on the cloud, but then pulling bulk data we use in-house daily (like for some work order generation and reporting) would take an eternity.
That's precisely the pros and cons kind of stuff one needs to consider when (or if) moving to the cloud. It's not for everyone... and it's primary capability is for scaling... high volume, high transaction kind of operations...

-tg