Is the Cloud A Safe Place for Your Data?

Today's Wall St. Journal has a thought-provoking article on the reliability of cloud-based infrastructure and it's rapid growth in the business world.

Let's get back to basics. There is nothing magical about "cloud infrastructure". It's still computers - processors, memory, hard drives. All that stuff still fails just as much as it did before we came up with clever and complex ways to scale these resources to meet demand.

For whatever reason, we seem to be very comfortable with the idea that we need to back up our own personal computer files. Perhaps it's because we've all seen a few to many blue screens. We can see our hard drive and how small and vulnerable it looks, trapped in the beige box that doubles as a coffee cup holder. We know that this little box with all our important documents, photos and videos might some day crash.

But if we take all those files and put them on someone else's computer, we feel somehow safer. We can't see the computer that stores the only copy of our family photos. We don't know the name of the 19 year-old who maintains the servers. We have no idea in what state, or even country, our data resides. Do they have backups? Much of the time there isn't even a phone number to call if something goes wrong.

When you start to think about it, there is a lot more uncertainty about web-based data security than there is about your own PC. So why do we not treat our cloud-based data with the same concern that we treat our own, local data?

Computers are computers. We can't get complacent just because we can't see them.