= Premium Content

  • Monday, May 28, 2012

Previous

Next

The Cloud Has a Lead Lining

April 22, 2011, 11:00 am

By George Williams

It’s been a bad week for commercial cloud computing.

ProfHacker favorite Dropbox had to defend themselves from a significant amount of negative press regarding the privacy and security–or lack thereof–of the data their users store with them. Amazon’s “Elastic Cloud Compute” service–aka EC2–went down for several hours, which incapacitated a number of popular Web services that rely upon EC2. If frustrated updates on the Twitters are any indication, people had a hard time accessing Apple’s MobileMe services for a day or two. And Apple’s iTunes servers were also “acting wonky.”

If you’re the kind to believe in dystopian futures, then you might conclude that Skynet has, in fact, become aware as predicted and right on time and has begun its machine rebellion against mankind.

If you’re the kind to be concerned about contingency plans, then you might have thought about how to tweak your workflow so that outages like these don’t make it impossible for you to get your work done.

If you are a regular user of online services similar to those described above, how do you plan for situations in which those services might let you down? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Joe Shlabotnik]

This entry was posted in Productivity, Software and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • JoshRose

    I tend to keep a copy of Benjamin’s Arcades Project and a candle on my desk for instances when web services go down. Okay…seriously, I find filtering web/cloud services through desktop apps or having local copies to be helpful for outages. For example, I access my Gmail IMAP account through my email client, so when Gmail goes down and the website is inaccesible, usually it is still accessible through my client. Also, when using services like Dropbox or Google Docs, I usually have them mirror local copies saved on my harddrive, so I’m not completely locked out if the service has an outage. The few minutes of extra work it takes is certainly worth the peace of mind.

  • mbelvadi

    You’re mixing together very different problems (accidentally exposed data versus inability to access your own), so very different answers to your question ensues. Anything that is very private that is stored in the cloud should be encrypted, period. I use DropBox, and the only file that I would be concerned if it got made public that is stored there is indeed strongly encrypted. I do think that a much wider selection of enrcyption tools for a variety of content needs to be made available and easier to use to the average computer user, of both macs and pcs.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    I’m not “mixing them together.” Rather, I’m pointing out that “[i]t’s been a bad week for commercial cloud computing” in a number of different ways. That said, I agree that different problems require different solutions.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Keeping candles and books stored for emergencies is always a good idea . . .

  • davidmbarber

    You realize that the cloud can be a better alternative than running your own data center or just your own server, but it isn’t a guarantee of constant availability. If you want to ensure continuous availability of information, a “business continuity” plan is still needed. If you are just one person, all that may mean is just having your documents/e-mails on your PC as well as in the cloud, music on an iPod and in the cloud, and so on. If you are a university, that means being in multiple clouds.

  • irnmtn25

    I have a brilliant idea….

    We can save our information on things called CD-Rs and flash drives. I trust the Cloud about as far as I can throw it. It is always a good idea to back up your back ups. If I am putting something on the Cloud, there is a good chance I am going to have it somewhere else too.

  • jrlupton

    Hard drive back up of important files. And know that there may be periods of interrupted service, as with any technology (or human being). Students, administrators, colleagues, and teenaged children trying to contact the Mommy Taxi need to know that even though many of us now walk around with smart phones and iPads, we may be out of touch occasionally.

  • interface

    This is why I don’t use such online services. More/easier/newer doesn’t always mean better. It can, as in this case, mean there’s a lot more to go wrong, in a lot more hands other than yours. So you end up with multiple redundancies that take more of your time to think about and tend. Too easy to end up more concerned with the can than the soup. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

    ~ Ugh-ugh the Caveman

  • geochaucer

    We’ve had two candidates arrive for campus interviews with their talks stored entirely in the cloud, with nary even a flash drive on them. This is a recipe for disaster in the admittedly rare event that the network or site is down. I got to help one candidate spend the first 5 minutes of his talk fighting through our campus security system to access his powerpoint presentation. People: there are times when you actually do want to be as self-reliant as you can, and job talks are one of them. I realize this is slightly off the mark of this fine column, but I wanted to point out some common sense limitations.

  • http://twitter.com/Normandale3119 Matt Dempsey

    I am generally trusting that my data in the cloud won’t be lost which may not be a good thing – Does anyone remember the problems that Sidekick users had a while back? However, I may not be able to access it for a while – the system might be down or I may be somewhere without connectivity.

    If I cannot live without the data or service for a period of time (and my general interval is a few days), I generally make sure I have some alternative available whether that is a local copy of the data, a alternative cloud application, a local application, etc. The less time I can do without, the better plans I need to have.

    I used to worry about what would happen if my computer crashed and I could not recover the data quickly and I had to plan for the possibility (I have fond memories of piles of ZIP disks laying around only to worry about the “click of death”). Could services have dramatically increased my options for recovering from that scenario but have introduced new concerns.

  • tgroleau

    I’ve had three significant “cloud” failures in the last two months.
    1) I took my junior high son and some friends to a shopping mall for the afternoon and planned to hole up at a quiet nearby library, use their wi-fi to access my on-line textbook, and make some lesson plans. Due to a construction project, the library wi-fi was out of commission. I went back to the mall in hopes of using their wi-fi but it was overloaded by demand and ran too slow to be useful.
    2) About a week later, my other son had minor outpatient surgery and I planned to use the waiting time to grade papers. I forgot to download the papers beforehand but I figured I’d use the waiting room wi-fi to download them. It was “temporarily” out of service.
    3) After that, I had to fly to another college for a few days. I told my colleagues and students that I’d be available via email in the evenings. There had been a security attack on the college’s wi-fi so they locked it down. It took a day and a half and multiple level of tech support for me to get access to it and get to my email.

    I’ve never been completely sold on the cloud concept, but these experiences showed me that you can’t count on the cloud at all unless you have your own reliable, portable access point (and I’m not yet willing to pay a monthly fee for a smartphone data plan).

  • awadewit

    I sync my data on two hard drives as well as store it in in the cloud. I use the cloud for two reasons: ease of access from remote locations and as a third backup, but it is not my primary backup. I don’t think I would rely on it as my primary backup, especially with sensitive data.

  • http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~jweiss Dr. Jillian T. Weiss

    Cloud computing reminds me of Swift’s Laputa, the floating cloud world, where they so often were taken up with philosophical speculation that they had to have servants strike them with flappers to bring them back to earth.

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

  • The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.
  • Washington, D.C. 20037