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My Top Scary Technology Trends

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Yes, it's that spooky time of year again, and our "fearless" editors have asked upon the ZDNet contributors to come up with "Scary Tech", the technologies that are so frightening, they'll make you evacuate from multiple "interfaces". Halloween. All Hallows Eve. Dia de los Muertos. Whatever you call it in your culture, Halloween is a day that for many people evokes images of ghouls, the undead, vampires, witches, werewolves, ghosts and goblins -- creatures of fantasy that are meant to scare young children. Although I've often been emotionally compared to a child, none of these things frighten me.

However, there are some things, at least in the world of technology, that really do scare the living crap out of me. While there isn't one particular item that makes me turn completely ice cold with fear this Halloween, there are a number of trends that definitely have been keeping me up at night lately. Click on the "Read the rest of this entry" link below for more.

Clouds Without Proper IT Controls

If the T-Mobile Chernobyl has taught us anything, it's that properly run SAAS products and cloud services need strict IT controls. No customer should ever have receive an email or read a web posting from the service provider that reads "Sorry, but due to unforeseen circumstances we've lost all of your data." Following best practices for IT Service Management for rolling out patches, fixes and software upgrades and having a business continuity plan that includes a robust disaster recovery strategy for storage with multiple tiers of protection will ensure that clouds one day become as trustworthy as the public utilities that we take for granted. But until then, clouds will be perceived as frighteningly unreliable and as dangerous as 19th century railroads.

End Users Who Live for The Present

Cloud and SAAS providers aren't the only ones who need to shore up their business continuity plans -- a frighteningly large amount of end-users go about their daily computing lives without making any kind of backups of their critical data whatsoever. Our own young Zack Whittaker learned the hard way about what happens when you play against the odds of Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and accidental catastrophic data loss on a consumer-grade hard disk, and then losing. Everything. Given the inexpensive cost of on-line data backup services such as Carbonite and external USB disk drives with the convenience of "one button" backup, there really is no excuse for not backing up your data. Don't let the data loss monster destroy you. Last year, I thought that this was important enough that it was my number one "Scary Tech" item. Zack Whittaker should have read it. Now I'm telling you to, right now.

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posted by Jason Perlow
October 29, 2009 @ 7:44 pm

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