Yesterday I saw this status update on my Facebook Newsfeed (among many other similar updates who had experienced the same problem).
It’s quite obvious users are not happy about their losses, nor can they be happy with cloud computing at this point. This post in particular sheds no light of hope for the poor unfortunate Sidekick users like Lindsey who are out of luck with no access to their contacts or other services on their phones. T-Mobile just published an official apology regarding the server error at Danger (a subsidiary of Microsoft) saying that the users may never see their precious data again.
And this begs the never-end question as to whether or not you can actually rely on cloud computing.
My answer – you get what you pay for, and what you pay for is the SLA. If your data is sensitive and/or important, it’s not smart to use a cloud that has an SLA of only 99.9% (or less, or none) and no data recovery or data backup options. If you don’t want to get Sidekicked like T-Mobile did, take a better look at what you’re storing in the cloud, what that means for the SLA and disaster recovery you need and what kind of people (and how much of their time) you need to run your cloud.
Not all clouds are alike – some are managed and some are DIY – some have high SLA’s like BlueLock (99.99% uptime), some have low SLAs and some are just dependent on the engineering your team is able to do.
There is reason to trust cloud computing, but you can only trust your cloud if you’ve done your due diligence and made the right choices along the way.
