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| The cloud is not good or bad: providers are |
Sidekickoutage The loss of data from all users of the popular Sidekick device offered by T-Mobile is launching many analysts to talk about a loss of confidence in cloud computing and the idea of having the data supposedly safe on a remote server. Sidekick is a service offered by a company whose name can not be more appropriate for the circumstances, Danger, which was acquired by five hundred million dollars by Microsoft in February 2008, acquisition after which suffered a strong personnel leak.
Sidekick data has been since the acquisition of the company hosted in data centers owned by Microsoft. According to existing information, on October 1, 2009, Microsoft outsourced a storage area network (SAN) from its data center to Hitachi, when something went wrong and resulted in a loss of data. The problem became catastrophic when it was found that Microsoft, incomprehensibly, lacked a backup copy of the data, so that, on October 10, after a period of a week's service crash, Warn the several thousand users of Sidekick of the loss of all their data: calendars, contacts, notes, photos and any other information that they did not have at that moment in his terminal. To truly realize the magnitude of the problem, there is simply a glance at some of the stories that users of the service have.
Following the announcement, T-Mobile has stopped offering the Sidekick service, offered a compensation of one hundred dollars to users claiming data losses, allows a unilateral breach of contracts and, although it seems that recently has announced that perhaps not All data is lost, Microsoft is seeing how the five hundred million dollars that was supposed to be worth Danger evaporate forced marches on a weekend.
No, the problem is not in the cloud. I have been working with service providers of all kinds: my photos are on Flickr, my favorites in Delicious, my documents in Google Docs, my emails in Gmail ... I have never had any problems, but instead many advantages derived from it in terms Flexibility, safety and comfort. But in all business activities, and the custody of third-party data is one of them, there are good, bad, and regular providers. There are reliable providers, and others who are not. A service provider of this type must, as a minimum, have a contingency plan that safeguards the users' data of possible problems derived from virtually anything, and that includes, as a minimum-minimum-minimum, having a copy of Security of the same that allows recovery after a problem. Not having it is an absolute irresponsibility, and it is something that should directly rule out a provider: it is more than likely that both Danger and Microsoft's Pink project for which the acquisition was made will disappear because of this.
When things are done as they should be done, the reasonable thing is to think that our data are infinitely more secure housed in a provider that is dedicated to that, than in our house, where we tend to be simply amateurs of security and redundancy. The problem arises when it turns out that the provider you trusted in is as amateur as you and, violating all logic, does not keep a miserable backup of the data. No, the cloud is not a problem. The problem is to trust who is not to handle it.
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