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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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