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Storm clouds may be gathering in cloud computing
(Image © 2009 - Jeffrey N. Fritz. All rights reserved.)
Storm clouds are gathering, but these are not the kind of heavy storm clouds expected to hit the Bay Area tonight and tomorrow. No, these storm clouds have the potential to be more devastating, create far more havoc and won't pass in a day's time.
These storm clouds are from cloud computing.
Cloud computing has offered many positive things to businesses. It has offered the potential for critical data to reside in seemingly secure locations, always accessible and fully backed up. At least these have been the promises and assurances from the cloud computing service providers. But has this really been the case?
Can a cloud computing service offer you better reliability and data security than what your own local data center can provide? Is the mission critical information that you entrust to a cloud service provider really protected? What kind of SLA do they offer to you and your business?
Security, reliability and firm SLAs are concerns around cloud computing. We discussed them in a previous column. These are things that you will want to find out before you begin transferring your valuable, often irreplaceable, data to a cloud computing service. And, in light of some well publicized recent outages in cloud computing, these issues have become even more of a concern.
Cloud computing outages have received extensive press coverage of late. Until now, most of the service outages were relatively minor and of short duration. Google's Gmail, for example, went offline in September for about 100 minutes. Google had underestimated the loading on their routers caused by updates to their servers. (Ironically, the updates that Google tried to install were intended to improve reliability. ) Apple's MobileMe recently went dark as well. However, Microsoft seems to have suffered an outage (or perhaps, more correctly, their users suffered an outage) in early October that had far more long term impact. This outage resulted in in permanent loss of user data.
As Microsoft stated at the time, “Regrettably...we must now inform you that personal information...such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos...certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft.”
The Microsoft outage has raised anew concerns around the very nature of cloud computing. It turns out that cloud computing's very advantage is also its Achilles heal.
With cloud services you rely on the service provider to safeguard your business data. In fact, by its very nature, cloud computing removes the user entirely from the picture when it comes to safeguarding and managing their own data. Most of the time that's a good thing. Service providers are supposed to be better than the average user in terms of providing data security and reliability--after all that's their business. However, these clouds of uncertainty have left some business users wondering.
We all know that rain is necessary to our lives, but a cloudburst occurring in a heavy storm can endanger lives. In a similar manner cloud computing can be both a blessing and a curse. As AppleInsider put it, "Users have reason to be wary about keeping all their data on a vendor's cloud service without also maintaining their own local backup...Delegating all control to the cloud sounds great until there's a problem that the cloud vendor has no interest or capacity to resolve for the user. It then quickly becomes a frustrating nightmare."
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