MIS & Data Interoperability

[Roberto]

@Roberto - not really many cloud MIS solutions are multi-tenanted i.e. multiple schools in one database. (remember I am not talking SIMS - we are not in the cloud)

 

Phil,

Fair enough and my apologies. I thought you guys had a cloud MIS offering as I live in Bedford and keep seeing Capita advertising for someone to herd clouds locally.

 

I think my statement about SLAs can still stand if you change where I said "you" to "a general cloud MIS provider", if you see what I mean. A cloud-hosted MIS system is really no different to a locally hosted MIS or other CRM-style app.

 

As for cloud providers being multi-tenanted, that's something I would regard with horror. I know we need direct 'back-end' access to the tables storing our data in our MIS system and therefore any solution that had us sharing a database either wouldn't fit our needs or would be running a massive risk.

 

This comes back to what I've said about cloud and virtualisation in the past - nothing magic happened just because someone said "cloud" or "virtual" during a meeting. A MIS product is still a MIS product no matter where it's hosted in the same way that Microsoft's Office 365 product is essentially 'just' Exchange, SharePoint and Lync hosted by Microsoft instead of the customer.

 

If I connect directly to the database behind any product and run DROP DATABASE then that's not the vendor's fault, especially if I was warned about it (provided, of course, that all the info in the DB was mine)... That doesn't change just because something is hosted in the cloud, though I don't doubt some people who didn't get the "cloud's not magic" memo would disagree :-(

Edited February 16, 2014 by Roberto

[matt40k]

There is also the issue of how do you control how much x third party thrashes the server or services if tapping directly into the database, regardless of they are core tables or not. What if x third party wants to poll every 10 seconds for the entire database which in a new cloud installation could be for an entire LA so 100000 kids full records...

 

When your working in the cloud, your paying for every single resource, read are cheap as it'll all be in memory (with any luck), writes are expensive. So maybe I should have said cost of space + change frequency. You'd make sure you have limits on everything, even your own services - things like querying the school name shouldn't happen every 10 secs, checking for messages you would, but you wouldn't use sql tables, you'd use queues. Anyway I digress into the future. Be interested in your findings we all know about the sluhore that is SIMS but be interested to hear how the other MIS provider fair when it comes to getting at the data.

 

 

 

(remember I am not talking SIMS - we are not in the cloud)

 

I might get this framed - if only I could find that post where you were trying to tell us it was.

 

If I connect directly to the database behind any product and run DROP DATABASE then that's not the vendor's fault, especially if I was warned about it (provided, of course, that all the info in the DB was mine)... That doesn't change just because something is hosted in the cloud, though I don't doubt some people who didn't get the "cloud's not magic" memo would disagree :-(

 

If it's managed and in the cloud and you got access to the raw tables, you certainly wouldn't have access to drop the database. Still I know what you mean, if it's been designed correctly it'll be all container-ed, however I suspect some companies won't have. It's one of the reasons Office365\Azure was forked from Office\SQL server.