The cloud Is broken and the sky is falling

After all the recent news dealing with Amazon or the Playstation network it may be hard for people to remain confident in the promise that the "cloud" has to offer. Day dreaming of people running around shouting "the sky is falling" seems to pop into my head. However, despite the fact that my confidence in the entire cloud movement is unwavering, I think the recent happenings bring out a lot of good points that people should know about. I have listed three that I believe in below:

Point 1: The cloud is not as secure as you think

Most people assume that when they put in their information online, it is sitting on some high tech server, safe and secure. Little do most people know that grabbing their passwords to most of their online services is a cake walk for even moderately knowledgeable hackers (before the data even gets to the "high tech server"). On top of that, the Playstation network fiasco only proves that not even the biggest companies are immune. As far as I am concerned, there is almost no such thing as un-hackable. The goal is to be so secure that it is not worth a good hackers time to try to break into your resources when there are so many other less secure options. That may be a slight exaggeration, but for the most part it is true.

Point 2: The cloud is not a reliable as you think

Amazon has proven this one. I had at least one website that was affected by the Amazon EC2 situation and I know countless others did as well. Anytime you put your information in others hands, you can never really be sure what is going to happen to it.

Point 3: The cloud will break

The Internet is still relatively young and the continuous growth of Internet traffic along with the increased movement of things online is going to prove that the cloud is not perfect. There will be problems. Things will go down. Data will be lost. Customers will get angry. Cloud based companies will come and go. The cloud will continue to experience growing pains.

The result of it in the end be a net positive, but if you are holding your breath and hoping for the best (like so many people are), be prepared for some disappointments and frustrations along the way.

Outlook

Despite the setbacks, I am still confident in the movement of (almost) all things online. I have no doubt that the trend is going to continue and I am going to continue to move more and more of my personal and business operations to the cloud. However, one thing that I will always keep in mind (as you should with anything you put online), is that my data could be compromised or lost at any time. This will help ensure that the necessary backup/recovery plans are in place.

Does this mean you should hold off from moving things to the cloud? I don't think so. However, just be certain that you understand that nothing is 100%, and have plans in place to handle the issues that may come up.

What do you think? Is the cloud broken? Leave your thoughts in the comments.