Cloud

I wanted to post the following two paragraphs to the web site, but they pushed me off into a place to open an account that wanted all sorts of private information - so I never posted it there. I fail to see why, to comment on a news article, I have to open an account where the first thing they must know is my date of birth, and closely followed by my email address - then terms of conditions that require I supply only true details about me and regularly check they are current and true. Take a guess who didn't accept their terms of conditions or provide true information for them to send me BS advertising. More Cloud to mistrust.

Sorry Michael, but the trust by fools will continue - this is the third such case of data failure within the Cloud in the last two years, and people still trust the Cloud because they are either not smart enough to learn from history or they're dumb enough to believe the marketing people's lies. The last such failure was due to the company closing down and not giving clients time to get their data off the company's servers, but still a Cloud service failure.

Data back up and security has been an issue since long before computers started - anyone read about hand written copies of bibles being handed out in the middle ages - and any Cloud service can only offer the exact same services you can use yourself, the only differences being who controls the devices and where they're located. And this doesn't get into the conflicts of laws between where I am and where the server is - can you image the Pentagon being happy about Defence data stored on a server in Taiwain? It's possible in the Cloud, remember not so long back when all the Goggleanalytics checks were being passed through their server in China due to a routing error of some sort. Once data is in the Cloud we no longer have control and no longer know where it is. Don't trust it, only fools will - and the world is full of fools.

edit - and guess which web site just got added to my blacklist so it's blocked from now on.

Any one who thinking with a technical bias as opposed to sales one predicted this.

And we were right.

Again.

MS did recover nearly all the data. But the setup where the backups were destroyed (at least apparently) when the production system went FAIL, is a rather sad state of affairs.

I'm shocked. < rolls eyes >
Not.

Today it's cloud computing, tomorrow it'll be something else.

When making decisions about your IT, use your brains, and consider what suits your needs best. You should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER pay attention to tech magazines, TR, CNET, and such. It's 100% hype, all articles are paid from various <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck#The_Reptiles_Slush_Fund">"reptiles slush funds"</a>.

In my company, we are actually moving away from virtualization for our future projects, because management, based on recent experience, considers this a future trend. Hyped trends are usually reversed in a couple of years. Sure, we use virtual machines, for tests, to migrate stuff from decomissioned hardware, and such, but not in production. Our CIO argumented this strategy as follows: "Adding another layer increases complexity, degrades performance, and generally doesn't really improve things, and this is what virtualization and cloud computing actually is. Adding a layer of complexity in the worst possible way."

I don't know about others, but I think he certainly has a point.