Amazon’s cloud collapsed. This is a very big deal since Foursquare, Reddit, Zynga and other big players went down as a result. Although cloud providers tout their 100% security
and uptime, Amazon’s collapse shows there will be mishaps in this very early cloud computer service. At the end of the day, the cloud boils down to one server that holds your files or applications. Whether it’s Amazon EC2, Google Apps, or Windows Cloud, all of these well-known companies still have the responsibility of ensuring their servers are redundant. Redundancy may be in the form of mirroring files from one hard drive to another on a server via RAID 1 technology, or going further to a RAID 5 enhanced parity setup.
In the case of Amazon, they lost the human element. Nobody noticed that there were excessive mirror backups, causing the storage level to quickly reach capacity. There were no checks to ensure capacity was not near and, in turn, lots of companies could not access their precious files. We are in an exciting time with the cloud computing industry. However, companies, such as Amazon, must be careful not to cut corners with their checks and balances. There must be a system in place to ensure critical errors, such as capacity overload, server hard drive failure, and Internet bottlenecks, are rectified before downtime occurs.
On the consumer end, it is wise to back up files either to a second cloud, office external hard drive or NAS (network attached storage) device. It is not enough to rely on cloud providers for reliability. Consumers should keep a backup of their own during this very early infant stage of cloud computing. So, if you’re thinking of store your files or apps in the cloud, make sure to have a good backup also in your computer network or home computer office.
