Cloud Storage

Kevin06 September 2011

I agree with Jon on the readiness of cloud computing. Firstly most people won’t have a high speed connection to the Internet. Slow upload speeds mean getting ever increasing multi-megapixel photos, HD video, and anything other than incremental backups in to the cloud is a painful process. Secondly reliability issues with both networks and the cloud provider mean you’ll be without your data probably when you need it most. We’ve seen a number of big name commercial cloud providers suffer outages. Thirdly security. In this frantic world of chasing features and gimmicks, sadly security (and robustness) seem to be low on the agenda and not properly tested. Sure we have strong encryption algorithms but it’s how the systems are put together and the administration of them that expose our personal details to the world. Yes I use IMAP, upload photos and incremental backups, and sync multiple PCs over the Internet. But the primary copy of my data will continue to reside on my hard disks, and be processed by locally installed freeware for the time being thank you.

Kevin10 September 2011

And just to prove my point above, millions of Micro$oft users were left unable to access online services including Hotmail, Office 365 and Skydrive recently. This time it was between 0300 GMT and 0530 GMT so most UK users were probably unaffected. Google Docs was also reportedly unavailable for a time on Wednesday. I'll look after my own data thank you very much!