The Cloud: Risky, Unreliable, and Dumb
Let's take a careful look at the cloud troubles of late. I know a lot of my readers associate me with skepticism regarding the viability of cloud computing. In fact, I have never thought the cloud and the idea of cloud computing was not viable. I think it's risky, unreliable, and dumb for many uses. Let's review.
Risky
The risky part is the fact that in many instances the cloud vendor could take a dislike to you for no apparent reason and shut you off, costing you all your data. By this, I refer to the many instances of people using mostly free services, and then suddenly the vendor decides the person is a spammer or unwanted in some community and the account gets closed. There is generally no recourse in many of these instances because too many cloud services don't have customer service. The whole idea behind many of the cloud concepts is about doing things cheaper. This thinking carries over to the entire operation and often there is nobody home, ever.
This scenario has happened over and over, and I often get letters from people, complaining that their Yahoo Mail account was buttoned up or they were kicked off. Hacking can also account for this, as too many people use "Password" for their password, because it says to type "password."
So I say it's risky because of users' over-reliance and failure to adequately back up everything and failure to have a back-up strategy. For example, let's look at two of the cloud services that I use: MailChimp and LinkedIn. I have a database of contacts on each system, and I back them up once in a while. This doesn't do me much good with LinkedIn, except to keep track of names, since it is a business networking scheme that cannot be duplicated off-site or locally. But with Mail Chimp, I can export the names to another similar system if necessary.
These and other cloud services are quite useful and valuable. My concern is the idea of reliance. What happens if I cannot access these services and how likely is that to happen? I'd prefer to do things locally. With LinkedIn, it's not possible, and with MailChimp, I cannot do it as well. So the cloud wins.
Unreliable
The reliability of the cloud is another problem I have. What happens when the cloud service just dies? It has happened to all the big boys. Even Amazon has issues. Google had problems and lost email accounts. Microsoft recently had a set back. And we've all watched Sony struggle with its online gaming system. This is the tip of the iceberg, and I cannot see how it will ever end. This is now particularly true because hackers have apparently decided to target cloud operations.
Local computers crap out too. But when your desktop machine dies, all your personal information and credit card data is not going to Eastern Europe to be used by criminals. You know the headline "ONE MILLION credit cards stolen!" How come nobody is asking exactly why this data is not encrypted? How can any credit card data be stolen if it's encrypted? And if it's taken at a level where it has been de-encrypted, what's the point of encryption in the first place? This again is a reflection of reliability. It's not reliable; it's just a cheaper way to do things.
Dumb
Then finally there is the "dumb" reason I dislike cloud computing. Woody Leonard wrote an interesting article about the outages of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. This sort of situation exemplifies dumb, along with the other attempts by Microsoft to move its regular Office Suite to something in the cloud that users can subscribe to. If something can be done locally, then it's dumb to put it in the cloud. It's dumb for the two reasons cited above: it's risky and unreliable. Plus, it's dumb because it adds a layer of complexity to something that should be simple.
I guess my point is that users have to be thoughtful and ask themselves three questions. How much can I trust the cloud provider? What can I do if the system fails? And finally, can I do this locally?
In other words, just think about things a little bit before you get carried away.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385463,00.asp
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