My partner at Digital Always Media (DAM), , and I are fond of debating the pros & cons of the “cloud”. The “Cloud” is that magical area in cyberspace that no-one can clearly define except to say “you know we store it on the cloud”.

To be technical the “cloud” is a collection of servers with mass file storage capacity. The owners of these servers rent out space not unlike a webhosting company or ISP. The difference is that companies renting the space are putting up web based services that let you store whatever you want on them. This a great way to safely back-up all photos and videos and immediately have them stored off-site all for an annual cost typically less then purchasing 1 or 2 removal hard drives.

Where does the term “cloud” or “cloud computing” come from? If you’ve been involved Information Technology (IT) as long as I have, you’ll remember all those network diagrams where the Internet was depicted as a nice white fluffy cloud.

Jim and I might disagree on different aspects of cloud computing but we do agree on this point. The cloud isn’t ready nor should we ever think it will be ready to your mission critical data storage solution. We both think as a location for secondary/off-site storage for your data, it’s ready provided you believe the hosting company has the appropriate security in place you need to trust it with all your data.

I’ve been around long enough to have witness many trends in the computer industry. These trends tend to repeat themselves time and time again. In the later days of main frame computing a major breakthrough occurred; physical hard-drives. This allowed for data to be permanently (or nearly permanently) attached to the mainframe. Operators no longer had to swap magnetic tapes for each application that need to be run and people working from terminals without physical hard-drives could remotely access these applications. With the advent of the PC in the mid 80’s terminals disappeared and stand-alone solutions started to appear. Before too long, organizations started deploying LANs and WANs and started moving to a “Thin Computing” model. The Thin Computing model implied that individual PCs barely had enough storage area for their Operating System, some basic programs and limited data storage. All storage intensive applications (i.e. Microsoft Office) and data would be hosted on a centralized computer which ensured security and regular back-ups. In essence closed system cloud computing. Yet this early 90’s concept was short lived because all work came to a dead stop when the lines of communication went down or a central server had to be rebooted.

By early the 2000’s I was working for a dotcom who was providing services to the graphics community including specific online applications and file storage (what we now call the cloud). As with many dotcoms in and around 2001 they burned investment money like fuel. One day when the bills could no longer be paid, their servers were shutdown without any fanfare and all those who had been using their service no longer had access to their data.

Eleven years later, even though the concept of redundant servers and failover servers, backup diesel & solar generators are common place, the realities of thin computing still haunt us. Jim Hedger once said “the cloud looks light, fluffy and inviting today, but when a storm is approaching and the wind pick-ups they’re going to get blow away”. Yes we are now seeing the first signs of “clouds in a storm”.

A few months back Meguploads.com was shutdown unexpectedly by a court order initiated by the FBI. It doesn’t matter who’s right as the matter is now before the courts, it’s the impact that matters. Many corporations had been using the Megauploads service to store gigs, if not terabytes, of mission critical business data on their servers. Several individuals were also impact as they had been storing all their family photos and videos there because they didn’t have enough hard-drive space on their computing devices. All those cherished memories were gone in an instant, just as if they had been lost in fire.

More recently there was a major blackout on the American Eastern Seaboard in the area surrounding Washington DC. This is impacted some of the locations of the biggest cloud provider Amazon. Despite having generators on hand, the strain of a black-out that lasted over 5 days required them to reduce capacity to ensure part of their piece of the global cloud was still there.

The reduced capacity impacted major cloud based application like Twitter. Perhaps you didn’t notice Twitter going down, but it was moving very slowly. To help Twitter from crashing Twitter in-turn reduced calls by 3rd party applications to prevent their remaining servers crashing. The result 3rd party Twitter applications and add-ons were not performing to their usual level of service impacting their paying and non-paying customers. I’ve even heard of a few applications being completely off-line for over 24 hours due to this part of the cloud being down.

And there is still the reality that your cloud based application might not be there one day. What would you do if one day you woke up and Dropbox wasn’t there, or Instagram or Flickr? Do you have copies of everything you’ve put there? Remember MegaUploads wasn’t in financial trouble, and given all the patent law suites being thrown around and overzealous law enforcement around these days who knows what application or services might be next.

If you’re a business and thinking of putting your applications on the cloud, make sure that you have the appropriate service level agreements in place that might require you putting your applications in two or more distinct geographical regions just in case 1 goes down. For individuals and corporations just using the cloud to store your data files, think of it as remote back-up service and not a primary storage area. Keep a copy of everything local (on your computer or removal drive). If your local copy fails you can turn to the cloud and retrieve your valuable data and if the cloud your using happens to blow away, then you’ll always have your original.

Jim Hedger

Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.

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Posted in Alan K'necht by Jim Hedger 1 Comment