Reply to post: economic math doesn't make sense

HMRC's switch to AWS killed a small UK cloud business

JLV

economic math doesn't make sense

Hmmm, cloud advantages are all about being able to spin up stuff as needed.

As people have pointed out, a tax revenue agency is going to spike near its filing deadlines.

The key bit though is that for the whole thing to make long term economic sense from the POV of the cloud provider, the servers need to be used most of the time, by various customers.

How does that sit with a cloud provider that is 85% reliant on one customer for its business? Do they sub-contract the HW use elsewhere? If so, what do they bring to the table, besides costs and more moving parts to go wrong? I mean over-reliance on one customer has always been a business risk red flag, but it should be doubly so for cloud providers.

'sides, cloud is hard - the big guys mostly manage to keep their occasional outages down, but they've all had teething problems getting there.

Seems (speaking naively about clouds) that the govt would best avoid lock-in by pursuing a cloud strategy that ensured it could shift its workload between the big cloud providers - Azure, AWS, <fill in the blank>. There are probably operational resilience reasons to do that as well. Start with one cloud, get your feet wet, then branch out to others. You wouldn't want to miss your tax take because AWS choked inconveniently at the filing deadline, right?

Not overly impressed with the article.

p.s. Tax avoidance is an entirely different can of worms, only tangentially related to the main subject of the article and seems drafted in to broaden the base for criticism of vendor switching.

I'd be 200% behind any concerted, well-thought-out efforts for industrialized countries to avoid the current cherry-picking the multinationals are engaged in. How about: take revenue in country X (UK in this case), multiply by net margin as filed in country Y - their main stock market listing domicile - (USA in this case) - financial statement fraud is usually a big case, then apply a floor minimum of 50% of country X's corporate tax rate * country X revenue, paid in country X. Multinationals not complying would simply have their business licenses revoked in country X and Western countries would agree not to pursue WTO cases where this was the trigger.

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