On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Giles Coochey <giles at coochey.net> wrote: > Actually, I think first major Cloud player to be majorly hacked will be a > double whammy to kill off the 'cloud' mentality: > > At least the following two will occur: > > * Everyone will question the security and privacy of their data in the > 'cloud'. > * The cloud provider will shut down for a couple of weeks (like the > Playstation saga) to investigate what was accessed and how. > > Can your company afford to be without your apps and data for a couple of > weeks, while some hacker organisation has it? > > I think not. But it's not like you can't do both. The Cloud has the benefits of convenience (available from anywhere) and flexibility (OS agnostic). You would hope 1) That people back up their work (at least to other locations in the Cloud), and 2) That they have a local substitute suite of applications. And it's not like local machines are immune to hardware and security break downs, especially for the majority who use Windows. At this point my music is stored online (Amazon, listening to it now), a lot of my documents are created with Google Docs or Zoho, my email is almost completely online (has been for years), my recent pictures are stored and edited online (Picasa and Piknic), almost all my "TV" watching is done online (Hulu, Crackle, TheWB) and a big chunk of my movies are supplied from online sources (Hulu, Crackle, Netflix). That said, I think it may happen that amount of traffic ultimately falls in on itself. I don't see how Netflix (in the U.S.) can continue to use nearly a quarter of the Web's bandwith (for example) without paying some kind of tariff from the cable and DSL providers. So all this streaming might slow down quite a lot if Hulu, Crackle, Netflix and the others have to charge their customers for bandwith. We'll see what happens. -- RonB -- Using CentOS 5.6