My sister has a T-Mobile Sidekick phone and early last week she started complaining that her phone had hard reset and all her contacts and calendar appointments had been lost. She was constantly in communication with T-Mobile all of last week until Friday when they told her that they would likely not be able to recover any of her lost information. I had simply thought that this was just something on T-Mobile’s end that they had screwed up and would have been a relatively isolated issue.
That was of course until this morning when I woke up and saw many articles commenting on how Microsoft had been the main party at fault for loosing the data as they are the ones that actually host it. Now I am not a big fan of Microsoft’s ability to handle my contacts in the first place, but this just seems bad to have a phone where you encourage people to store contacts, calendar appointments and pictures in the cloud and then not have a redundant backup system in place to protect it.
Now I could go on about the Sidekick’s previous failures, but I want to focus more on Microsoft for the purpose of the gloom they are putting on cloud computing as a whole. The purpose of cloud computing is to not only be able to access your information stored in the cloud from anywhere with internet access but to keep it safe and secure. The first part is relatively easy to get right, simply putting something up on the web makes it accessible from anywhere in the world. Keeping it safe on the other hand is where the tricky part comes in, but it still should not be that hard to keep a redundant system in place with redundant back ups. I’m not going to touch on the issue of security as that can be a complicated matter when you involve users.
I am a firm believer the cloud computing is the future, but it will take longer for people to accept the ideal with large companies like Microsoft publicly dropping the ball on a large number of users. Not only will it persuade customers away from using these companies cloud computing services but it will likely steer them away from using cloud computing in general.
These companies need to take it upon themselves to set the example and plan for the worst possible outcome and be prepared. Risk management is part of every business, so there is no reason Microsoft shouldn’t have been prepared.
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