Last Friday, David Chappell spoke at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Barneveld (NL) about Cloud Platforms in general and a lot about the Azure services platform in detail.

When talking about Cloud Computing David identifies three categories:

1. SAAS (Software as a Service) ex. SalesForce.com  == App in the cloud
2. Attached Services == Combine on-premises applications with cloud services
3. Cloud Platforms

To me, the most important part of the talk was hearing his lists of advantages and disadvantages of SAAS and Cloud Platforms in general.

So what could be the pro’s and con’s of cloud computing / SAAS?
Pro’s:

• Less financial risk
  - No large up-front investman
  - Try before buy
• Lower costs (initially, at least)
  - No license buy (pay per usage)
  - Shift fixed buying expenses to variable operating expenses
• Faster deployment
• Higher Availability
• Easier upgrades

Con’s:

• Trust (which is a major thing; do you trust the service provider? will they protect your data?)
• Regulatory and compliance issues
• Customization (tailoring)
• Integration (with on-premise applications)
• Identity (federation)
• Management (monitoring)
• Support

He then further talked about the Azure services platform itself; perhaps I’ll write some more posts on this subject later on. I first like to have investigated it a bit more.
Overall, I really liked his talk. You can hear why he’s a frequently asked speaker; great job!

PS. David wrote a short introduction about Cloud Platforms; go read it here.