How Secure Is The Cloud?

Instead of just being that fluffy chunk of moisture that glides along in the sky, the ‘cloud’ is promised as being the next big step that comes after the World Wide Web.

I use Gmail extensively, not just for my personal emails, calendar and contacts, but also for work, simply because I’ve yet to figure out how to get Lotus Notes to work the way I want it to. One colleague  writes his submissions almost exclusively on Google Docs, again for the simple fact that he can resume work from home right where he left off if need be, without having to copy the document to a thumb drive, for example, and have to remember to re-copy the completed article back onto his work machine.

However, when the internet (or said email service) decides to take an unannounced break, there’s the sinking feeling that five minutes ago might be the last time I see my email. That’s exactly what went through my mind when Gmail went down for nearly three hours in late February this year.

If you’re a proponent of backing up your data online, Carbonite very recently lost about 7500+ customers’ data, claiming faulty hardware as the culprit.

And in a case of the extreme, bookmarking service Ma.gnolia suffered a data meltdown early this year, with data corruption and loss taking out a large chunk of their users’ bookmark data.

Web-based services aren’t exactly new. Flickr, Picasa, Gmail, SkyDrive or even Carbonite; all these services basically require you to chuck your data on their physical servers, and hope for the best. Whether keeping your data from catastrophic loss (why hello, corrupted database!), or even keeping prying eyes from taking a peek at what you’d thought was secure, once you’ve committed your data to the cloud, it’s literally out of your hands.

Let’s not even get into the issue of keeping all your backups and uploads synchronized across the many services you use. For example, you could upload a stack of images to your Flickr account, but having them all appear simultaneously on your blog, Facebook, Picasa etc involves a great deal more effort than most care for.

Some argue that relying solely on the cloud isn’t very smart, preferring to rely on a combination of having copies both in the cloud as well as on local machines, hard drives and the like. After all, you can make only so many backups, and there exists the chance, however small, that all your backups might just fail one after another. Dead hard disk? Cloud service shut down? Corrupted backup files? The list goes on and on.

Better yet, if you happen to live in a country with craptastic internet infrastructure – Malaysia (thanks, TMnet) for example – your access speed to the cloud will be literally cut off at the knees most times.

Bottom line, the only real way the cloud will work is if two key issues are tackled: getting reliable access to the cloud, as well as the availability and reliability of the cloud services in question.

How do you store and access your data online? More importantly, would you trust your data to a third party?