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Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

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Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#161

Post by razakel »

dismalaf wrote: post #98
bitpush wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such. If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?

> If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company? You sure you like this analogy? Every ambitious restaurant (Michelin stars, World's 50 Best, that type) uses small farmers to try obtain higher quality produce. It's chain restaurants and shitty family restaurants that use the large suppliers.

You go to those restaurants for a boutique experience. You can't run an enterprise based on whatever your suppliers have available on the day.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#162

Post by herbst »

entuno wrote: post #158
herbst wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if a company that doesn't need a technical team even needs that technical overhead? No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office. Not only cheaper and taking away the update obligations of Microsoft. Which I am sure kills more productivity than managing a Synology server.

> No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office. Sounds like even more of a single point of failure, just on your domain provider (who's much more likely to go out of business) than Microsoft. And one with no chat, or phones, or conference calling, or shared calendars, or endpoint management, or SSO, etc, etc. Just sticking all your data on a cheap NAS in…

What do people consider as NAS? A Network Harddrive? If you buy a "normal" Synology Nas it comes with shared calenders, office, VPN control, several backup options including Aws and Azure and a lot more. Typical setup and forget setup, thanks to their high package quality.

And I am sure there are even better options than a household Synology.

But putting everything in a cloud and fully depending on a single provider that for the majority of people is in a foreign (and politically dangerous) country is definitely not the obviously better option.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#163

Post by IsTom »

ArcHound wrote: post #117
lmm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the trick behind ROSI. You weight the expected cost without mitigation against the mitigated cost plus the cost of your solution. Right but that's clearly not the right way to think about it; if you did that you'd never buy insurance (and probably never do any security work tbh, since very little of it can be justified in expected value terms). The impact of catastrophic damage is nonlinear.

Yes, at the end of the article I come to the conclusion that this method has flaws. But the general insurance can be modelled with ROSI. Say you have a 300k USD car. Say that a crash will cost you the full cost. You expect one crash in five years. You then have a yearly expected cost of 60k. If you get an insurance that pays for it all, for 10k USD a year, your ROSI is 500% which sounds like this insurance product is…

That's like saying that you can make profit off credit card debt if rates are negative. It's not a real-world case and nobody is going to offer that, it's not an analysis of any insurance that actually happens.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#164

Post by razakel »

herbst wrote: post #159
esperent wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is far from the highest priority. I do store quite a bit of files for marketing but those only need to be accessed by a few people. Also, much as I wish otherwise, very little happens via email in this business. It's all chat apps now. The important part is cross platform real time communications, calendar, and office. Some kind of kanban board is a nice bonus.

Synology does all that, they even have some kind of office suite (haven't tried, I would just use libre and a central storage) Synology is also setup and keep running for years usually. It's just an example tho. I just don't see any need for a Microsoft cloud solution for a small company (or anyone really)

There's a demo on their website:

https://demo.synology.com/en-uk/dsm

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#165

Post by guappa »

jiggawatts wrote: post #39
cyberax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.

Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true. Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable . Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/…

> Deployments are just "file copy".

Ah yes how the "works on my machine" meme started!

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#166

Post by graemep »

iimblack wrote: post #50
bob1029 wrote: post #18

The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones. Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it. There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situation…

How do you separate the good from the bad? What do you do when Microsoft changes the good things into bad things? My take is that Microsoft consistently makes bad things and makes "good" things into "bad" things; so, I don't have much expectation or faith that anything that I currently think is "good" will stay that way.

Services are bad - that is what the first part of the story is about.

However I do not think it is different for any online service. Any American company would have to cut off services to an individual (or organisation) subject to sanctions (the main example given). The same might apply to other countries for various reasons. There are various reasons a service might fail, or cut off a particular customer (lots of reasons, lots of examples in previous HN discussion).

What has changed is that the typical MS customer is a lot more dependent on MS services - MS 365, Python in Excel ONLY works in the cloud, people used hosted email instead of their own Exchange installation...... That means MS cutting off a customer would mean all their IT would cease working. They can just shut down any organisation with that level of dependency if they are ordered to, or decide to, do so.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#167

Post by guappa »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #93
protocolture wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? By the time you get through the first half of the requirements document of most windows customers, OSX and Linux alternatives have already been thoroughly ruled out.

When it starts with the phrase “FIP-S compliant”, hardly anyone is wants to do that on Linux.

You live in a parallel universe where wolfssl doesn't exist?

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#168

Post by graemep »

I am not convinced by the argument about cost, particularly "You’d still have to be more efficient than Microsoft though - that’s a challenge"

1. Most, even quite big organisations, do not have the complexities of operating at the scale of MS services.

2. I have no idea how efficient MS are. maybe they are highly efficient, but I know enough big businesses are inefficient that it is not a given.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#169

Post by entuno »

herbst wrote: post #162
entuno wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office. Sounds like even more of a single point of failure, just on your domain provider (who's much more likely to go out of business) than Microsoft. And one with no chat, or phones, or conference calling, or shared calendars, or endpoint management, or SSO, etc, etc. Just sticking all your data on a cheap NAS in…

What do people consider as NAS? A Network Harddrive? If you buy a "normal" Synology Nas it comes with shared calenders, office, VPN control, several backup options including Aws and Azure and a lot more. Typical setup and forget setup, thanks to their high package quality. And I am sure there are even better options than a household Synology. But putting everything in a cloud and fully depending on a single provider…

Well yeah, that's what a NAS is. What you're talking about is just self-hosting a all-in-one server, like people used do with Windows Small Business Server, and all the problems and limitations that comes with.

And plenty of small businesses and hobbyists do that, and then after they "setup and forget" it they get compromised or lose their data a few years down the line.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#170

Post by graemep »

esperent wrote: post #126
ArcHound wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheap and it works well. Also integrates into everything related you'd need.

Also, if you're a small business without a dedicated tech team, what are your options that don't involve relying on a single big company? Speaking for myself, running a bakery, I chose MS 365/Teams with regret but accepting that there's nothing else out there with the same value proposition except maybe Google workspace. They have regional pricing so we get everything for the equivalent of $3.50 per user. Basically n…

> The only thing I've found with a close value proposition (still slightly more expensive even if I limit to just a few gb of space per user) is self-hosted Nextcloud, which is about the same level of janky and requires a tech person or team to set up.

I would not imagine storage to be a major cost with something like Nextcloud. They major cost is going to be the tech person to set it up, and you do not need that many hours to do it. Mostly an initially one off cost will be high, and big upgrades might be a lot of work, but maintenance should not be

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