Tech/Horsepower

The cloud is all the rage these days. The internet is locked in a struggle of the future fundamentals of technology in our lives. One camp would continue pumping out full feature PC’s with complete operating systems. The other camp would have us buying essentially thin terminals running a web browser – everything we do integrated into the internet. But there are also some people like me. Those who know and understand both sides of the struggle and desire moderation.

I make a great deal of my living from cloud services. The firm I currently work for provides most of our application services over the internet, our client’s information stored with us. This has given me a unique, somewhat insider understanding of what it really means to “live” on the cloud. I’ve felt the pain of downtime through a perspective unknown to many: with the shotgun barrel pointed at me.

Errors, unexpected behavior, and downtime are a fact of life in internet technology. We have learned from our share of mistakes that cause downtime. We will continue to learn from them. But some of the hardest lessons learned have been through no fault of our own, situations outside of our control that caused us downtime. Even the most ironclad 100% uptime guarantee is a mirage, a fantasy providing a false sense of security. Read the fine print, if the SLA isn’t met, what good is a refund of services? You’re likely paying a teeny amount compared to what you’re billing clients. To put it another way: you may get a $500 service credit, but you could owe your clients $5000! Worse, you cannot put a monetary value on lost trust.

However, in much of the business world there is still a “downtime happens” understanding provided data integrity is maintained and it doesn’t happen often and/or for extended periods. Businesses tend to think about all possibilities. They craft contingency policies and collectively think about crisis mitigation. Business prepares.

We, as individuals, do not. Most of us panic. This is why our entire lives in the cloud without balance is a bad idea. The internet isn’t about just having fun anymore; we’re putting more and more of ourselves on the internet. We’re banking, doing our taxes, buying groceries, storing our treasured photos and memories, and files that allow us to make a living exclusively on the internet. Housed in data centers in cities we’ve never visited, countries we’ve never heard of, and on servers we have absolutely no control over or access to.

Many people are surprised when a huge entity has a major service impacting issue because this is not clearly understood by the masses. As our services hum along without issue, questions are not raised and consequences are not considered because of false senses of security. We continue to migrate our most precious and secure information to services we do not control.

Imagine a future where everyone stores their lives only on the internet, and a significant event causes massive downtime. No access to your files, your finances, your way of life. Like becoming stranded in a packed elevator, mid-floor, and your cell phone doesn’t work. Even worse, your information is completely wiped out. Terrifying. So how do we use properly utilize cloud technology?

Moderation is the first key: integrating the cloud into our lives – not putting our lives into the cloud.

There is a happy medium for many between the fully featured PC and the thin terminal. I believe that we can and should reduce our consumption of fully featured PC’s because for most people, they’re overkill. PC’s have reached a point where performance and density vastly outpace most workload. Simply put, most people do not need a quad-core powerhouse to use the internet, email, and manage their photographs and documents. Allow me a bit of the “green” angle: reducing PC features and component consumption will help us conserve energy from manufacturing all the way to individual household power use. It will help us relieve pressure on our earth resources.

But a stripped down thin terminal with a browser for an operating system is not the answer either. If you’ve never used a thin terminal, it’s basically the most stripped down “computer” you can get, often with no processing parts and no local storage designed to connect to a server that does all of the processing. There is a huge body of thought building that thin terminals are the next wave of computing, a toaster with a web browser. All of your information stored on the internet and accessed over the internet. This is bad.

Low-feature computers – part thin terminal, with local processing power and storage – are our answer to the future of technology in our daily lives. You can manipulate and keep your information in two places, on your computer and in the cloud. I believe netbooks have inadvertently kicked off this transition. They have proven very popular for the exact reasons desktops created in their image will be the future of computing: low power, low cost, compact and less wasteful design. A green alternative allowing access to all the cloud will soon have to offer without sacrificing the integrity of local information.

Why Google scares the heck out of me.

Google and I have a love-hate relationship. I love their services, they have revolutionized the way we access information on the internet and they are pioneering cloud-based services that make our lives better, more fun, and efficient. But I hate them because it’s too easy to become complacent and rely on them for everything. I host my email with their Apps service. I use their RSS reader, burn RSS feeds for this website through Feedburner. My wife has switched to Gmail from pop3 and fallen in love with their calendar. Her family is quickly migrating their information to a Google site. Contact info, birthdays, photos, casual conversation.

What happens if Google cannot or will not provide these services anymore? This is the second key to appropriately using the cloud – diversification. The most important part of what I use with Google is email, which I access through pop3 and download into Outlook. If domains went away tomorrow, I would be upset (especially since I lose all of my spam-catching groups!) but I will still have a local copy of my email. When using cloud services, keep copies of important information in multiple places and diversify. Google is rumored soon to launch Gdrive, their own cloud storage for your files. Google is becoming a one-stop shop for the cloud. Of course they are, they are pioneering the future of cloud services and building a business on it. But if you host your email with them, your files on the Gdrive with them, and you lose access – without another copy of important information – it’s all lost.

That’s why Google scares me. They make it so easy to use their services that should something catastrophic happen so many people could be in a very bad situation. As we migrate to the cloud, resist the ease of the cloud.

The fundamentals still apply – keep copies of your important information in more than one set of hands. And never forget that nobody cares more about your information than you.