What if the cloud gets hit by lightning?

If there are clouds, there might be rain–And it is raining, it is pouring…

I know there are a lot of scary stories out there–you probably have a favorite one yourself (mine is the Pixar debacle where the award-winning movie Toy Story was almost lost — https://blog.servint.net/tag/pixar/), but I always thought that the cloud would be safer than my own laptop. After all, my own hard drive died while I was travelling this year, and the cloud saved me.

Well, I am soaking wet right now: iEtherpad.com, one of my favorite online collaboration tools, seems to have gone down, and some of my data along with it. The site won’t load, and emails bounce.  Some of my data is backed up on my hard drive, some isn’t. After all, don’t I have my project online to avoid having it offline? Don’t I back up to the cloud? What’s going on?

Are you thinking of moving to the cloud? There certainly are many advantages. Keep in mind my top three concerns (there are many more):

Internet connectivity–will you be able to get online when you need your data?

Security (privacy)–Public cloud, private cloud or a combination? How bad will it be if your information goes public?

Security (availability)–Can you avoid a catastrophe if your provider goes down? Will you need to have to a hard back-up anyway? Is that practical? Will your files be portable? Can you easily change services if you want?

Does anyone out there have an umbrella?