During a routine check of a client’s server and its backup facility I noticed that the amount data being backed up had reduced significantly.
As anyone would, I asked my customer where all the company documents had disappeared to. I will admit that I was quite tentative in asking such a bold question (as their IT provider) almost expecting the response "What do you mean?"
To my shock his response was (with a proud smile) "A computer genius friend moved them to the cloud". Which was then followed up with "I'm hoping to move my accounts system (INTACT) to the cloud too".
While I believe the "Cloud" offering does have its place in business IT, (I use it myself in the form of Gmail and Google Apps for simple things like notes) I believe the jury is yet to return on its long term viability.
Why? Just a few reasons in brief:
Legality – If you are storing your company records in the cloud, chances are you are storing personal information about your customers. EU data protection law would see this as a breach. Perhaps not right now as these laws seem only to come into play when information has been leaked, but you can be sure at some stage that it will.
Trust – Websites, Emails, Newspaper Articles, News Readers, Government Websites all preach to us about how never to give your banking details out to anyone. Do not tell anyone your address, your name, your inside leg measurements because as soon as you do your identity will be stolen and you will be wiped from existence. However, according to a marketing person you should put everything you have on your computer up to a place on the internet on a server that you have never seen and have never spoken to anyone that has ever seen where it is located. Ireland, France, UK, US, Cayman Islands, Iran or all of the above?? I believe there must be a question over giving all this information to a company like Google whos share price is based solely on the amount of information it can get its hands on.
Longevity – How long will it be before Microsoft takes over Google or Apple takes over Amazon, or Roman Abramovich takes over the lot! Where will your data be then? How will you access. Every had a domain name registered with an online company that were taken over by another online company….
Reliability - http://www.creative-seo.co.uk/creative-seo-news/search_engine_news/gmail-down-00174.php
It often makes me wonder how people can get caught up in buzz words like "Cloud Computing", "Virtualization", "Blade Systems" etc while real concerns such as Backups, Malware Protection and Internet Abuse fall by the wayside – Marketing budgets I suppose!
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