Not every cloud has a silver lining by Cory Doctorow

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctorow-cloud-computing

by fogus • 17 years ago

29 7 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

3pt14159• 17 years ago

In some countries depreciating a storage server takes multiple years, while paying $50 for a service does not.

wmf• 17 years ago

He's talking about "the average punter", not businesses.

betageek• 17 years ago

Doctorow appears to be warning 'punters' that someone giving them a service may be trying to make some money (shock!) and that we should all just store our 'encrypted bits of state information' - meanwhile I just thought we were trying to provide a useful service to users. Doctorow's slide towards Troll continues...

lsc• 17 years ago

and? it makes sense. sure, for a server every now and again, ec2 is hard to beat. But if you use a few servers all the time, well, it's a whole lot cheaper to build and host your own.

teeja• 17 years ago

As an 'average punter', I'd never never ever put anything I valued into a 'cloud'.

Why become dependent on a service that can walk away at any time? How many times have people been screwed by net schemes that folded ... just for music alone?

Then there's the security question. How many stores and banks have lost millions of customer accounts to hackers? I can protect my stuff better than you can ... simply because it matters to me more than it will ever matter to you ... but also because my storage is part of the diffuse cloud of all users, not the concentrated cloud of a few giants with big bullseyes painted on them.

electronslave• 17 years ago

This is true. Some clouds have silver linings by talented writers.

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

To repost the comment I made on the article:

I think this is an unfair comparison and Cory is oversimplifying. For example:

"Rather than buying a hard-drive once and paying nothing – apart from the electricity bill – to run it, you can buy cloud storage and pay for those sectors every month."

Files stored on services like Amazon are split among many hard-drives to protect from data-loss should any single drive fail. Not only that, but data is also replicated in multiple sites to protect from a geographic or network disaster in a single location. More than that, the cloud-provider is assuming the cost for any failed hardware in running this setup, the cost of paying someone to physically replace the hard-drives.

That's just the part which keeps the data safe. What about the availability? If you keep your data at home in a desk-drawer then you can't access it on the road. With a cloud service you are getting always-on, always-available data access, with guaranteed levels of speed which will be far in excess of the capability of domestic broadband connections (in which the upstream connection is throttled).

So while I agree that there is a definitely cost difference between cloud services and buying and running your own hardware, the cost is associated with real tangible value, it's up to you to decide if that value is worthwhile. Personally, I value that my backup service in the cloud will not loose my data. I can't say the same for the USB hard-drive on my desktop.

Not every cloud has a silver lining by Cory Doctorow

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