May 16th, 2009
Google goes down, questions about cloud computing arise
On Thursday, a major outage affecting 14% of Google users caused widespread panic, and raised questions about cloud computing in general. This outage happened just when the US Goverment began discussing how cloud computing fits into their $78 billion IT budget for 2010.
Running companies (and the Goverment for that matter) in the cloud is risky business. In theory it sounds interesting, but in reality you better know what you’re getting into.
Before you decide to jump into the cloud, you should ask yourself some important questions:
1) When there are problems, are you comfortable knowing that you have no control? Your users will want to know what’s going on, but you won’t have an answer. Is that something that you can deal with?
2) If you ever want to switch providers, do you care that your information is going to be difficult to get out of the cloud? And even if you do, its remnants will likely saved on computers other than your own for a while?
3) Do you care that people you don’t know have access to your data? True, they aren’t likely to do anything with it, as they have probably signed some sort of agreement with the company hosting your data, but do you know that?
The cloud is an exciting, yet scary place still — in my opinion, it’s too early to adopt these services completely. What do you think? Leat’s hear what you have to say in the TalkBack!
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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