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Steven, Your (mis) perceptions about cloud services are a lot like my (mis) perceptions about the Internet way back in 1996. That year I worked for a company that gave me a project to develop an on-line banking application for customers, and we "concluded" that the Internet and web browsers were too "insecure" for them. So we ended up writing our own Windows client, which became obsolete the moment we released it. A costly mistake on our part. It turned out that a browser interface was the only realistic choice for that type of application, and that type of user. I was clueless, but I learned a lesson that dramatically changed the way I would later approach questions about emerging technology. I may not remember much from college, but one thing that stuck was that if you take a system with a failure rate of 5 per 1,000 and you back it up with another system with a failure rate of 5 per 1,000, you end up with a failure rate of 25 per 1,000,000. That's what cloud data centers do.
They are much more fault tolerant. They get bandwidth from something like 5 separate suppliers so that if one goes down they immediately switch to another. Very few businesses can afford the level of redundancy that goes into most cloud data centers. A year ago, I too would have questioned the stability of these data centers, and questioned whether our applications and data would be secure there. But since that time I've had an opportunity to tour a few facilities and concluded that they understand the requirements of business, are more qualified to meet them than the vast majority of IT organizations, and are willing and able to meet them. There is plenty of room to facilitate different clients with different requirements, and various arrangements can be made through tailored agreements. You might even own the server, and just plug it into their racks. But I think it makes more sense to lease a partition on a shared server or similar arrangement.
As far as the quality of applications that might be deployed as a cloud service, that depends. As far as I'm concerned, that might be up to you, because you could be doing the work yourself, or defining your requirements for someone else.
If you have concerns about an Internet connection going down at your location, then you might arrange for redundancy there too. In our area we have options for phone, cable, and satellite connections.
> I would be curious as to the de minimis level (OS, language, data)
> etc. of HTML reporting. In other words, does it require DB2 and external data ?
I think most of our applications would run on 5.2 or higher. But I think all of our customers are on 5.4 or higher. We use an API to generate HTML stream files, but I suppose that a data source could be just about anything. I thought that you were NOT using externally defined files (no DDS no SQL DDL); That you were using only input specs in all your programs. But some of the dialog in this thread made me question that?
All of the code generators, reporting, database maintenance, inquiry, and dashboard utilities that I'm aware of in the "modernization" space require externally defined files (DDS, at least). But I'm not fully aware of every option.
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