Losing faith in the cloud

Over the last few years, I’ve been a great believer in the benefits of cloud computing but events of the last month have shaken my faith in trusting data to another organisation’s servers.

The most immediate challenge was a trivial, but irritating, crash last weekend when I lost my monthly client newsletter just before sending. The really frustrating thing was there was over a month’s worth of relevant, interesting web links for clients along with six hours lost work in the vanished work.

While trivial, my little disappointment illustrates the fundamental problem we have with cloud computing – we can’t trust the businesses and governments who control the net.

Simply put, the internet itself isn’t as trustworthy as we’d like.

Egypt’s closing internet links, Wikileaks being hounded off the net and the Queensland floods all illustrate this on a far bigger and more important level, we cannot take the cloud or internet access for granted and when service is interrupted the failure is total.

Natural disasters like the Queensland floods or the 2009 Victorian bushfires give rise to the trite response that “the internet is designed to survive a nuclear war.” This is true, but this view overlooks the internet maintains service by finding a detour around the damaged areas.

Which is problematic if you find yourself in a distressed area and the internet has routed itself around you and your modem, which is something we should keep in mind every time someone suggests using social media tools for disaster management.

It doesn’t take a natural disaster for you to lose access to your data. The hounding of Wikileaks of the commercial, US operated parts of the web shows how much of the internet is controlled by corporations enforcing spurious terms and conditions.

You don’t have to be Julian Assange for this to happen to you. Last year a Sydney Jeweller had her Facebook page shut down because her doll showed too much nipple while last week an English healthcare assistant had her account suspended because she had the same name as someone famous.

Like Julian, both had their access frozen without notice and struggled to receive any sensible answer from their service provider. Unlike Julian, subsequent media embarrassment finally forced Facebook not only to acknowledge their customers’ concerns but also reinstated the services.

Far more worrying are government controls. Until last month, most of us in Western democracies – this writer included – conveniently ignored how quickly telecommunications companies and internet service providers will accede to the demands of governments.

Both the Egyptian shutdown and Wikileaks reminded us how wrong we were. Governments of all persuasions can and will shut down internet services to suit their domestic political agendas.

Here in Australia there are proposals to filter the internet or shut down accounts to protect us from what Canberra and various lobby groups deem to be copyright infringement, pornographic material or video games unsuitable for 14-year-olds to play.

Even without the more extreme proposals being introduced we’ve seen the websites of Queensland dentists and political satire sites being blocked or shut down on these grounds. In both cases the actions were taken without the site owner’s knowledge.

As our businesses and society in general becomes more dependent upon the internet, we need to keep in mind there are risks which need to be managed. Cloud computing itself is a great business tool, but we need to understand the risks and costs of depending upon other people.

If you’re looking for cloud services, you’ll need a product that offers a backup to your systems. Business is built on trust and right now there isn’t a lot of it around in the online world.

Paul Wallbank is one of Australia’s leading experts on how industries and societies are changing in this connected, globalised era. When he isn’t explaining technology issues, he helps businesses and community organisations find opportunities in the new economy.