The illusion of a silver lining

Jan 13th, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: The Web

Rough weather ahead There is a lot of talk these days; along with more and more startups targeting the whole area of cloud computing which means nothing more than relying totally on your applications and data being stored on remote locations that you really have absolutely no control over.

I’ve never hidden the fact that I don’t like the idea of using remote applications such as Google Docs etc but the idea of having your data; personal or corporate, being held remotely by some third party is even more troubling. A good example of the negative impact of storing your data in the cloud is perfectly illustrated in a post today by Mathew Ingram.

In his post Mathew points out the possibility of a third party data storage company called OmniDrive going belly up; or to use the popular term these days - headed for the deadpool. According to Mathew the company founder Nik Cubrilovic is reporting that everything is rosy even though a past CTO of the company is telling everything that the truth is exactly the opposite.

While Mathew quite rightly compares the he said - he said nonsense going on to that of Sam Sethi and Blognation, the fact is that if indeed OmniDrive is dead in the water what happens to all that data that customers stored with them. What guarantees do we have that any other company like OmniDrive won’t suddenly be gone, along with all the data stored with them.

The idea that I should trust some Web 2.0 startup with a minimal or no business model with my data might on the surface should very attractive but really with the price of hard drive space being as low as it is and getting cheaper all the time why in the world would I want to risk the chance of my data going poof because the company closed it doors.

OmniDrive may just be a localized instance where the silver lining of computing in the clouds has become tarnished but with an ever increasing amount of companies fighting for those pennies or advertising dollars do you really think it’s wise to risk your data this way.

Listening to: Paul Van Dyk Feat Jessica Sutt - White Lies - White Lies (Aural Float)

[tags]OmniDrive, cloud computing, remote data storage[/tags]

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Viewing 2 Comments

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    Steven, from a data security point of view, you're absolutely right. The bottom line to the general public is the word "free". Slap that on anything and people will think they're getting the steal of the century. Now, I'm not familiar with OmniDrive's pricing scheme, or business model, so I'm making some assumptions. However, with the current trend of people discovering the need for offsite storage, I think these kinds of questions will continue to pop up.

    Curious what you think of solutions like Amazon's S3 online storage options.

    Rick
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    Obviously something like Amazon's S3 storage has the advantage of being an extension of a large and well entrenched company - as would Google GDrive or Microsoft's LiveDrive (or whatever either company ends up calling their version) - so the fear of anyone's data suddenly being gone as in the case of someone like OmniDrive is less likely.

    Now I don't know how S# or any of the others work as far as being able to access data within their respective clouds but the idea of relying on any third party to keep their data secure is worrisome. As much as we might like to believe that the data will be secure the simple fact is that for every security measure that one institutes there will be someone who will break it.

    True enough the same could be said for localized data storage but I will still be more comfortable with using it before remote storage.

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