Cloud Computing Growing Pains, Whom to Blame

Cloud computing. Microsoft and and amazon have both had trouble supporting their cloud computing efforts. Amazon has suffered DNS attacks and Microsoft managed to loose a bunch of T-Mobile customer data. Well, maybe it was some other company that Microsoft heired or bought called Danger (Not touching that one.). The gist is, there was no backup of any of the Sidekick data ... ever. Not just before a major upgrade that went south. Not last week. Not last month. I really hope some heads roll. I hope some one goes to jail for out and out fraud.

These issues have proven that Cloud Computing is not that much more reliable than good old fashion computing. The issue is who can you blame. It sucks to say "I lost our data." It is nice to say that "Microsoft lost our data." In this case Microsoft is blaming a hardware company for not backing up before an upgrade. You get the idea.

I use Gmail. That is cloud computing. I have all my contacts in there. I also use Google Docs. I have a bunch of content in that mechanism. There is an effort to provide the ability to simply dump your content to a folder on your local drive as a backup. I can't wait. I will definitely take advantage when I figure it out.

Someone at the office said "You would think Microsoft would have their shit together and keep a backup of data." I answered basically "I have used Microsoft products and I have no such faith in their work."

The rule is, keep local copies of important data. That is easy to say and difficult to practice. I do not know how to pull my information off of T-Mobile's site for example. They believe they have a vested interest in holding my data hostage so  I will not leave their service. I wish someone would mandate a user bill of rights that says I have the right to take my data and business elsewhere. If you have hold of my data, you have to give it back to me in a useful and transferable format so I can take my business elsewhere with my data in hand.