Cloud computing…it’s all the rage in tech circles. Move your applications and data to “the cloud”, the web. Don’t worry, it’s safe…. It’s accessible…. “Nothing can go wrong…”
Oops. Today, another report of turbulence in the cloud. An outage of Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. What happens now? I guess you wait till they find and fix the problem, and hope they have not lost your data.
So is cloud computing is a high-risk proposition?
February 26, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Depends how you look at it. Cloud computing is not merely storing one’s data on a third-party’s resource, it’s also about using computational power - at least with grid computing and being able to leverage that in such a way as to reduce TCOs.
Seems to me you are more of a pilot so i’ll let you go.
February 27, 2008 at 8:57 am
You’re right, Adarsh that cloud computing includes these other capabiliites. But what is being widely communicated now to mere users like me is the ability to have my applications run and data stored or backed up in the cloud. Not unlike this blog and my Gmail and Yahoo accounts. But when the service goes down, the user has little recourse except to wait for it to be “fixed”. That’s pretty scary if you are talking about business apps and data or irreplacable data like photos or video. So it still seems high risk, for these kind of activities anyway. Backup, baby!
March 2, 2008 at 1:46 am
There is risk involved, you’re right. But along the way the high assurance of these technologies have been the reason why they are still around and being used by so many people and it’s probably no doubt that we’ll become better and better at managing our data.
Also disasters and data outages are not new and the industry has therefore been able to build mechanisms in dealing with these. I will agree that the services should give us more option on how we retrieve the data that is stored (for backups). Currently there are ample methods to upload information, but I can’t think of a single e-mail provider who allows you to download all your e-mails as a compacted backup file.
That is definitely something to look forward to.