Cloud Computing - Who's Watching Your Back?

Implications

Cloud computing is all the rage, but what happens when your data no longer is under your own control? What would happen to your business if access to email, accounting, and other information just stopped? Do you have a business continuity plan should your hosted applications or data go offline, become corrupted, or destroyed? And do you realize that the courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data?

Analysis

Cloud computing is all the rage this year, with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), Agathon Group, ElasticHosts, and dozens of other providers available to you. Amazon S3 was down for nearly 8 hours on July 20, 2008, Gmail has suffered multiple outages of up to 2 1/2 hours affecting more than 113 million users, Ma.gnolia bookmarking service suffered a database failure, and Carbonite lost data belonging to 7,500 customers.

There are also security and availability worries when your data no longer is under your own control. ”There are legitimate questions enterprises should ask about the security, scalability, availability and reliability of a cloud computing solution,” says John Sloan, an analyst with Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ontario. Oh yeah, and the courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data. If the police want to read the e-mail on your computer, they need a warrant; but they don't need one to read it from the backup tapes at your cloud provider.

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Source: glgroup.com