Blame It On The Cloud

I went on vacation last week, and while I was gone, it seemed like the sky was falling. [For those of you keeping score, yes. That is two ridiculous “cloud” puns in a row, thank you] While checking out my RSS feeds when I should have been relaxing, I saw that T-Mobile Sidekick users had lost most of their data because of a server error at Danger. I knew what was next.

Let’s Start Bashing The Cloud!!!!!!!

Losing your data is awful. I get it. And naturally you want to find someone to blame. In the T-Mobile situation, it’s fairly straightforward and clear to see that Danger didn’t have the proper backup policies in place to be able to restore user data effectively. And to their credit, many bloggers out there are pointing the finger squarely at Danger.

But not all of them.

Nope, there’s the inevitable anti-cloud crowd that sees the fact that Danger screwed up as proof that the entire concept of the cloud is doomed. The angry mob that forms every time something can be remotely associated with anything “cloud”.

But to me, the idea that bad backup and server misconfiguration is an indictment of the cloud is the same as saying food poisoning is proof that we shouldn’t eat food. It just doesn’t make any sense.

If you’ve ever had a hard drive fail, would you then decide that disk-based storage is the problem, and instead print out every file and document because hard copies are more reliable? Or maybe we need to get back to carving stone.

Sure, I’m being extreme and ridiculous here, but it just seems like people are going out of their way to shift the blame away from the obvious cause and instead blame it on the cloud to fit an agenda. It’s kind of like looking at a person with a knife in his hand after stabbing someone and saying “it’s not his fault he just stabbed someone, it’s society that caused this heinous crime!”

Okay, enough of the awful similes.

I think C|Net’s Rafe Needleman said it best:

The company’s failure to keep the data safe shows the world how fragile cloud computing is. Even though, really, it isn’t. The world knows how to build systems that safeguard data from hardware and software and network failures, and even from hacking and other forms of sabotage. The fact that Microsoft failed to keep the Sidekick data backed up indicates, rather, how management can fail.

But hey, I’m biased. What do you think?

Tagged as: Backups, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, Danger

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