We talk about embracing the cloud a lot here, Kevin’s long cloud journey was a popular one. There are many good reasons for adopting a cloud computing philosophy and we won’t go into those again here. There are also some good reasons to fear the cloud and one of the reasons most often heard is that you give up control over your own stuff when you move to the cloud. Rather than rehash that old argument because good cases can be made for both sides of it, a news item from our friends at WebWorkerDaily makes the case for us.
Two popular productivity services, I Want Sandy and Stikkit, both free and covered by WWD in the past, are shutting down for good on December 8. Rael Dornfest, the genius behind both of these cloud services, has accepted a job at Twitter and will shut them down on December 8 due to the inability to continue providing them. This is great news for Mr. Dornfest and I’m sure everyone wishes him all the best in his new job but it points out the exposure that users take on when they move either their data or the services they depend on to the cloud.
Protecting your data that you move to the cloud is straightforward as almost all cloud services allow you to back up that data somewhere, somehow. But what happens when the cloud service or company you’ve adopted goes away unexpectedly? Sure this case involves a one-man company offering free services but if you have trusted these services to run your business that’s little consolation. In this business climate even large companies can go away and therein lies the rub for those on the fence where moving to the cloud is concerned. What happens to your business if your cloud apps or services go away suddenly? How do you temper that exposure to protect your own interests?
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