Anybody who has stood on the top of a mountain range in claggy weather knows that clouds are a wet, cold, windy and nasty mess of unpleasantness, discomfort and danger. and they drift in and out. One moment you can see for miles, and the next you are blanketed in clag, and you are totally miserable.
The other day I was reading a pop-tech article about "The Cloud" in a consumer magazine, and noted how almost every sentence contained either error or misconception about what the cloud is, how it works, and how useful, convenient, safe, secure, and reliable it all is.
Imagine how it would be if my mate Don, who is a project manager for a tech company, and was recently sent to Montevideo for a week to consult to a sister company on a roll-out of their firm's technology in that glamorous city, if having uploaded all the relevant materials to the cloud before he left, arrived in South America to find that the accounts department at home had forgotten to pay their annual bill to the cloud storage company, and Don was now shut out from his data. I cannot imagine a worse recipe for stress, and wasted time and opportunity, not to mention financial loss.
Okay, in reality the cloud is probably a server-farm in Dallas or Milwaukee. But what would happen to your precious backup (and I really do mean precious, as well as vital, valuable, and deeply confidential) if the firm in Dallas went bust or was subject to a hostile take-over from Wall Street. Who would now own your data, could shut you out from it, raise your fees, have access to it to use however they wanted? Would they respect the contract you had with the original provider? Do you imagine they would care deeply about customer service, the sanctity of a legal contract, and your right to privacy?
OK, now let us imagine that Don in Montevideo has lost 3 days (don't forget there's a time-difference) sorting out access to the firm's cloud-storage account. Are we sure the data would still be there. What if they binned it? My own telecoms provider once dinned my account password after being hacked, and when access was re-established it was a fresh account, and all my contacts, emails and attachments were lost forever. Did the hacker get them? Is there now a Russian mafioso running around Europe with an NZ passport and credit-cards in my name? And did Don have any time left over in Montevideo for tango lessons?
The consumer article went on to advise against using shared computers to access your cloud services. Well now, what is the point of being able to access your data from anywhere if some access points are intrinsically insecure? Surely Don wants to have a conversation with a person in Montevideo, take down notes, phone numbers and what have you on any pc that was handy, save a text file to the cloud and fly home again happy that a contact report was already lodged back at HQ.
I am not saying that the Cloud is a bad thing. But... I am certain that its enormous popularity is due in part to laziness. Why don't we want to take responsibility for our own data, especially those crucial backups that will save us from ruin if the worst happens? Shouldn't we keep our data on our own hardware where we know it is safe and inaccessible. Bearing in mind that redundancy is our greatest tool against data loss, then a little black flash-drive kept in the bottom drawer of the spare bedroom round at mum's place, or in the ceiling of the garage, is still the best hedge against fire or theft.
So hardware, not fluffyware, might just be the best way to stay in control of your own destiny.
The other day I was reading a pop-tech article about "The Cloud" in a consumer magazine, and noted how almost every sentence contained either error or misconception about what the cloud is, how it works, and how useful, convenient, safe, secure, and reliable it all is.
Imagine how it would be if my mate Don, who is a project manager for a tech company, and was recently sent to Montevideo for a week to consult to a sister company on a roll-out of their firm's technology in that glamorous city, if having uploaded all the relevant materials to the cloud before he left, arrived in South America to find that the accounts department at home had forgotten to pay their annual bill to the cloud storage company, and Don was now shut out from his data. I cannot imagine a worse recipe for stress, and wasted time and opportunity, not to mention financial loss.
Okay, in reality the cloud is probably a server-farm in Dallas or Milwaukee. But what would happen to your precious backup (and I really do mean precious, as well as vital, valuable, and deeply confidential) if the firm in Dallas went bust or was subject to a hostile take-over from Wall Street. Who would now own your data, could shut you out from it, raise your fees, have access to it to use however they wanted? Would they respect the contract you had with the original provider? Do you imagine they would care deeply about customer service, the sanctity of a legal contract, and your right to privacy?
OK, now let us imagine that Don in Montevideo has lost 3 days (don't forget there's a time-difference) sorting out access to the firm's cloud-storage account. Are we sure the data would still be there. What if they binned it? My own telecoms provider once dinned my account password after being hacked, and when access was re-established it was a fresh account, and all my contacts, emails and attachments were lost forever. Did the hacker get them? Is there now a Russian mafioso running around Europe with an NZ passport and credit-cards in my name? And did Don have any time left over in Montevideo for tango lessons?
The consumer article went on to advise against using shared computers to access your cloud services. Well now, what is the point of being able to access your data from anywhere if some access points are intrinsically insecure? Surely Don wants to have a conversation with a person in Montevideo, take down notes, phone numbers and what have you on any pc that was handy, save a text file to the cloud and fly home again happy that a contact report was already lodged back at HQ.
I am not saying that the Cloud is a bad thing. But... I am certain that its enormous popularity is due in part to laziness. Why don't we want to take responsibility for our own data, especially those crucial backups that will save us from ruin if the worst happens? Shouldn't we keep our data on our own hardware where we know it is safe and inaccessible. Bearing in mind that redundancy is our greatest tool against data loss, then a little black flash-drive kept in the bottom drawer of the spare bedroom round at mum's place, or in the ceiling of the garage, is still the best hedge against fire or theft.
So hardware, not fluffyware, might just be the best way to stay in control of your own destiny.
