PCCA Journal|1
st
Quarter 2011
35
contractual service and reliability guarantees.
To be sure, reliability of the services has improved dra-
matically, and there is something enticing about not needing
to buy the latest version of a software package because the
service provides the latest version “in the Cloud.”
But, getting back to my unfortunate relative.... He hit the
cloud wall when he realized that his data was unavailable
when the cloud was unreachable. Therein lies the weak link
in the chain that makes up cloud computing, and that allows
me to wax cynical about the information technology (IT)
field’s penchant for the latest and greatest.
As a tech aficionado, the hero of this story was doing the
right thing: backing up his data to keep it safe. He under-
stood that his business would suffer dramatically if he was
not able to maintain his company data in a perpetual state
of readiness. He also realized that, given the small size of
his company, he could not justify the expense of a full-time
IT person to keep an eye on things and he didn’t have the
time to do so himself. So when he started seeing advertise-
ments for cloud-computing based backup services, he had an
“Aha!” moment and immediately signed up. He was conver-
sant in “uptime” and “service availability” and “hardware
redundancy” and so on.
Within a short time, he had all of his company data backed
up to “the cloud”…and that’s where his data lived. He had
no local backup and no way to access that which lived only
in some cloud-based computer buried away in some base-
ment or IT grotto...somewhere.
He was able to recover his data after a few days, and he
still uses the cloud. But he has made sure that he can operate
on his own if there is a failure of that cloud by keeping an
up-to-date copy of all his “stuff” on hand for emergencies.
Having experienced loss of service, I know there must be one
of those “Murphy-type laws” that breaks things the exact mo-
ment you need them.
He’s also rethinking his habit of using the cloud to store
his most sensitive correspondence because he really isn’t
sure who might see it. (He has read and understands that
ev-
erything
traveling the internet gets parsed by some company
looking to extract marketable data.) He also doesn’t laugh at
me any longer for being a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy
when it comes to disaster recovery.
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