The US court orders demanding Twitter and others hand over Wikileaks related information may have killed the cloud computing trend.
Paul Carr in Techcrunch raised his concerns about how this has affected his views on storing his personal life and details online. He’s not alone.
Cloud computing relies on trust and confidence; for us to use it we have to trust our data is safe, secure and confidential. That many of us are even suspicious that Google and Amazon have quietly handed over the Wikileaks details shows how that trust has been eroded.
The behaviour of the US cloud providers shows most will buckle under the slightest political and government pressure, let alone a letter from the FBI of which the New York Times claims over 50,000 are sent each year.
That tens of thousands of these orders are made each year in the US alone – and we should have no doubt that governments in other countries are just as eager to seize online details – shows how insecure our information is in the hands of third party providers.
This is more than just activists who have upset the US government; in the event of a trade dispute, spurious copyright claim or a simple case of political malice or opportunism a businesses’ service could be shut down, often without any warning, due process or appeal.
Which is exactly what Amazon and various other cloud service providers did to Wikileaks.
Cloud services offers great business advantages, particularly to small and startup enterprises. But the Wikileaks shutdown scandal shows the managements of many cloud computing providers are untrustworthy cowards.
For many businesses it will still be worthwhile sticking with cloud services for the convenience, cost and scale however it’s also important to keep in mind these providers cannot be trusted and a backup plan has to be available should they fail.
The data we keep online has to be considered as well, it appears we cannot trust cloud services with our critical business and personal information so we need to be discriminating about exactly what we put online, this includes social media services like Facebook and Twitter.
Cloud service providers have to prove they deserve our trust, right now it’s difficult to see how they can regain it.
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