> 
> Sure, but balance that with podunk.usa's possibly incompetent IT staff?
> It costs a lot of money to run a state of the art shop, but only
> incrementally more as you add more and more instances of essentially
> identical shops. I guess I have more trust that Google is going to get
> the redundancy, etc right than your average IT operation.
> 
> Now whether you should *trust* Google with all of that information from
> a security standpoint is another kettle of fish.
> 
> Mike

I agree, Mike.  Problem is that the communications infrastructure that enables 
these sorts of options is generally so reliable people don't think about what 
will happen if something happens between them and their data that takes out 
their access to those services.  Imagine a situation where several municipal 
governments in, say, Santa Cruz County, California are using such services and 
there is a repeat of the Loma Prieta quake.  Their data survives in Santa Clara 
county, their city offices survive but there is considerable damage to 
infrastructure and structures in their jurisdiction.  But the communications is 
cut off between them and their data and time to repair is unknown.  The city is 
now without email service.  Employees in one department can't communicate with 
other departments.  Access to their files is gone.  They can't get the maps 
that show where those gas lines are.  The local file server that had all that 
information was retired after the documents were transferred to "the cloud" and 
the same happened to the local mail server.  At this point they are "flying 
blind" or relying on people's memories or maybe a scattering of documents 
people had printed out or saved local copies of.  It's going to be a mess.

The point is that "the cloud" seems like a great option but it relies on being 
able to reach that "cloud".  Your data may be safe and sound and your office 
may have survived without much wear, but if something happens in between, you 
might be sunk.  And out in "Podunk", there aren't often multiple paths.  You 
are stuck with what you get.

Or your cloud provider might announce they are going out of that business next 
week.


Reply via email to