Lessons Learned from Consumer Cloud Services

Ron Miller — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:12:48 +0000

Earlier this week Mozy, which is owned by EMC, ended unlimited storage subscriptions. Even a company as large as EMC reached the point where it was a victim of the service’s popularity and the increasingly large multimedia files folks are backing up. The question is: If it could happen to Mozy, could it happen to one of your cloud services?

For every customer using a service like Mozy, you need hard drive space and redundancy and all of that costs a certain amount per user. At some point, the numbers just don’t make sense any more. I guess that EMC has reached the tipping point.

In the future, the service is going to get a lot more costly. According to a CNET article, it’s going from a flat rate of $82 for two years of unlimited service to 5.99/month for up to 50GB of data and $2.00 for each 20GB block after that. Still, a very reasonable deal by most standards, but quite a bit more than the initial deal.

Meanwhile, Jason Perlow writes on ZDNet about Flickr, the free photo service being too big to fail, or at least that’s what he hopes given that he has thousands of photos on there. He even tells the sad tale of a guy who lost 4000 of his photos when Flickr inadvertently deleted his account. Thankfully, they eventually found them — had to be on backup somewhere right?

Why should you care, I hear IT pros scoff. You’re certainly not using any two-bit consumer service for your company data, right? Well, you should care because these two tales are like the proverbial canary in a coal mine. If it can happen to consumers, dear readers, it can happen to you too.

As I reported in a recent blog post, “92 percent of the companies in [a] Management Insight Technologies survey used at least one cloud service and 53 percent had 6 or more services.” That means you aren’t quite as secure as you might believe. If your company is using public cloud services — and if this survey is any indication, chances are that you are — these two stories should be a wake-up call.

What it means, as I’ve written before (but it doesn’t hurt to repeat), is that you need to understand your Terms of Service, and you also need to understand what happens if those terms change. If the price of the service gets uncomfortably high, how easily can your data off one service and onto another, or back onto the cozy confines of your own in-house servers?

Further, make sure you understand the service’s backup, redundancy and disaster recovery plans. Even reputable companies fail. Who can forget the disaster Microsoft faced back in October, 2009 when they hosed all of the Sidekick data they maintain. They eventually recovered it, but it was an ugly reminder of what can happen to cloud-based data.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to scare you away from cloud services. They can be very useful indeed for many functions and there lots of advantages to going to the cloud, but just understand what you’re getting into, as you would with any service, before you sign on the dotted line.

WikiLeaks Shut Down Provides Lesson for Cloud Buyers

Ron Miller — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:17:35 +0000

I don’t tend to go negative when it comes to the cloud, but the story earlier this month that Amazon Web Services cut off WikiLeaks for “violating the terms of service,” gave me pause. Instead of running scared, however, it could be a good ‘teachable moment’ about understanding your Terms of Service.

In a post on the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Europe blog, Ben Rooney reported that Dr. Joseph Reger, who is CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, said that Amazon’s response to WikiLeaks showed a need for industry standards around the cloud. That’s because in his view, if it could happen to WikiLeaks, it could happen to you, and he has a point.

I’m sure Amazon feels it was in the right because it says WikiLeaks was using content that didn’t belong to it. Well, yes, technically it was, but it wasn’t a pirate site by any means Would Amazon have shut down the New York Times web sites if it had been using Amazon Web Services? I think not. So while Amazon’s lawyers are probably off the hook, as Dr. Reger pointed out, what they gained in legal points, they lost in public perception.

That’s because they played into the biggest fear that cloud critics have, and that’s the general sense of unease when your content sits on somebody else’s server and is in another company’s control. If Amazon decides you aren’t playing by the rules, you could be in the penalty box and your business severely compromised.

What’s most disconcerting about this action was the arbitrariness of it. It wasn’t a law enforcement official or a court ordering the content be taken down (although there were reports of State Department pressure). No, it was the lawyers at Amazon making the decision, and that should be frightening to everyone.

What this shows is the importance of understanding every word in your Terms of Service (ToS). In the new brave new world of IT responsibility, negotiating the ToS with cloud providers like Amazon is going to be Job One. Don’t rubber stamp it. Make sure you and your organization’s lawyers understand every word.

If you’re not happy, negotiate. And one point you should always place in the ToS is that under no circumstances will they shut you down without written notice and sound legal reasoning (meaning a court or legal authority has ordered it),

There really are a lot of positives about going to the cloud. This idea of only paying for what you use is very attractive, but there have to be clear rules about up time, governance and who can take your service down (and as Reger said, these should be codified into an industry standard). In my view, if you haven’t received a court order, you better keep me running. You don’t ever shut me down because you feel uneasy about my content (as with WikiLeaks).

WikiLeaks has been an object lesson on so many levels and the shut down at Amazon just provides one more–this time for IT professionals. The cloud has positives and negatives like any other approach, but you can reduce those negatives with smart planning and a clear ToS. If you haven’t learned this by now, you never will.

View From Above » Terms of service

Lessons Learned from Consumer Cloud Services

WikiLeaks Shut Down Provides Lesson for Cloud Buyers