Jerry Fahrni

InformationWeek: “Think of the one million T-Mobile Sidekick customers that may have lost important data last week. Think of the dozens of CIOs that anxiously waited for Workday to restore its SaaS service on Sept 24. Cloud computing has created a new era of accountability, and we must demand that tech vendors work harder than ever to prove their trustworthiness. In both of these instances, customers were completely dependent on their vendors to manage their data. And in both instances, technical failures are to blame. The growth of cloud computing is not going to let up—we’re not going to suddenly start moving away from the Internet and speedy networks and store more data on our home PCs and company servers—so it’s time that everyone, from consumers up to CIOs at the world’s biggest companies, start asking questions and demanding accountability from their vendors.” – Cloud computing has been taking a beating in the press lately. Everywhere I turn someone on the internet is talking about the Sidekick fiasco, and I have to agree that permanently losing your customers data is inexcusable. However, this type of failure happens in the “non-cloud” environment as well, you just don’t hear about it. Last year our facility had an email server fail. Some, but not all, data was lost and we were without email services for nearly two weeks. It was the most productive time of my life. The cloud model is relatively immature at this point in time and will suffer failures and setbacks as it continues to develop. Hopefully the Sidekick failure has provided us with a valuable lesson that will be used to further improve the cloud. Only time will tell.