The Dangers of not Considering the Cloud

Bradley Sauln
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Just because something new is scary, doesn’t mean it’s dangerous and the processes/environment you are comfortable with today may be more dangerous than you think.

8 minutes into his interview for NPR’s How I Built This with Guy Raz podcast Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams, explains why he left the safety of BCG to start brewing beer with a very insightful metaphor that applies to many scenarios:

“Staying there was very risky, leaving it was not risky. It’s the difference in life between things that are scary and things that are dangerous. And there are plenty of things that are scary but aren’t dangerous. And there are things that are dangerous and not scary and those are the things that get you”

He goes on to use a climbing analogy where repelling off of a cliff is a terrifying thing to do, but you are also using a rope that can hold a car. So walking off a cliff backward is scary but not dangerous. On the other hand, walking across a 35-degree angle snowfield on a late May afternoon is not scary, but it’s very dangerous. The snow is melting, eventually forming a layer of ice and the water will lubricate that giving you an avalanche. Now that’s dangerous.


I talk with people every single day and listen to their concerns about trusting a cloud-based solution or moving away from their current environments on-premise because they feel safe with what they know and trust.

The truth is, this is very dangerous.

I have also had other conversations with prospective clients that lost all of their data due to a minor building fire (the location of both their data AND backups) and would be down for months costing them in time and money. Or one that sent data to a vendor for quoting and finding a knock-off of their product a few weeks later.

We are not experts in cloud storage or computing, and I don’t know many engineering companies that can take a test to that claim. So we don’t try to be experts. We trust the experts who have thought of every scenario you haven’t.

When it comes to Amazon Web Services or any other cloud solution for that matter, the idea of moving your company data to the cloud is scary, but it can save you from the dangers you may currently face.

Listen to the full podcast here:

*My opinions and writing are my own and may not reflect the views of current employers

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Bradley Sauln

Written by

Engineer @Onshape by day, tinkerer and world explorer by night.

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