On 01/21/2012 12:19 PM, George Bonser wrote:
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.
The problem is that the local infrastructure might just as easily get taken out
too.
Here in SF, I'm sure that the entirety of the data center capabilities aren't,
say,
housed in city hall itself, so we're just as vulnerable to partition whether
they run
their own infrastructure as we would be if we hosted in the "cloud" too. The
larger
issue here is diversity and resilience. The internet is guaranteed to fail us
at the
worst possible time, full stop. We need to make certain that we keep at least
_some_
terribly inefficient and thoroughly antiquated means of doing the same thing
viable
for critical tasks. When I was at Cisco, there was a push to getting emergency
responders
to coordinate their communication infrastructure both for cross coordination as
well
as of course cost down. Makes perfect sense... so long as the unthinkable
doesn't
happen (ie the internet failing us). That's why our new IP monoculture sort of
gives
me the creeps.
Mike
