Site Search

Google
 

Wednesday 30 July 2008

The Cloud

The Cloud is on-line software, otherwise known as SaaS (Software as a Service). Whatever your thoughts are on this subject mine are that it is the biggest pile of insecure twaddle ever to be invented.

I personally would never trust any company with what could conceivably be personal and sensitive documents. On-line storage for data is all well and good but a quick looked at the news web sites will reveal many of these places have been hacked at one point in time or another. Until such a time as they are impenetrably secure there is no way on this rotting Earth I would trust anyone with my personal documents. Even if they ever get the holy grail of being impenetrably secure I would still never use them.

Yahoo!, Amazon, Google are all involved in this. Thay all have their fingers, or should that be heads?, in the cloud. I cannot bring myself to trust any one of them. Google, Do no evil, are the worse offenders for collecting and storing all the personally identifiable information they can glean whenever you use their search service. Of course Google have much much more than search these days and whenever you use one of those Google services you give them more and more data about yourself. It is scary.

Microsoft, that peddler of the most insecure software, has recently started investing in suh services. This is the last company on Earth I would use. Their track record on security in their software operating system is abysmal at best and utterly shocking at worst. Why would any one think their track record in the could would be anything better? It will not be.

All these, and more, companies want you to use these services so that they can focre you to do away with computers that have storage. They are slowly moving towards that goal where you will no longer store files on a local machine but will instead have total reliance on the company in the cloud.

Let us not forget server outages. Once you are reliant on a given company and their servers disappear for hours, days on end (as recently happened at Amazon) then you are doomed as your company could lose millions because you cannot access the cloud.

Be you a company of a private citizen, trust this cloud at your peril. It will all end in acrimonious tears. Especially since Microsoft are now involved. Be afraid, be very afraid. You are dripping information about yourself all over the Internet. Until our collective governments grow a spine and stop this data mining then expect massive company or personal losses as one after another get breached and all data stolen. Before you realise it your clone somewhere in the world will have stolen everything you have.

Be scared. Be very very scared.

No comments: