The Cloud Is Falling? Not
My first grade daughter likes to read bedtime stories. The sky is falling is one of them. There must be something in those rhymes... If you are not familiar with the story, here's a short version: The chicken believes the sky is falling down because an acorn falls on her head. She decides to tell the King, and on her journey meets other animals who join her in the quest. In most retellings, the animals all have rhyming names such as Henny Penny, Cocky Lockey and Goosey Loosey. Finally, they come across Foxy Loxy, a fox who offers the chicken and her friends his help. Here, the plot gets a twist and there are many endings...
After this point, there are many endings. In the most famous one, Foxy Loxy eats the chicken's friends, but the last one, usually Cocky Lockey, survives long enough to warn the chicken and she escapes. Other endings include Foxy eating them all; the characters being saved by a squirrel or an owl and getting to speak to the King; the characters being saved by the King's hunting dogs; even one version in which the sky actually falls and kills Foxy Loxy.
Last week, the sky (or the clouds)
So now everyone (almost...) talks about the problems of cloud computing, why it should not be used and fingers are getting pointed.
If you read this blog regularly you know that I'm a great risk management believer. Protecting assets and data without proper risk assessment will lead to catastrophe. Using online backup service requires the same attention and anyone that really cares about his data will use multiple backup methods (think "defense in depth"). Having said that, while this failure is indeed epic, it cannot and should not be used against "cloud computing as a whole". It happened, now let's move on and make sure that our data (no matter where it is located) is safe.
Going back to the story, depending on the version, the moral changes. In the "happy ending" version, the moral is not to be a "Chicken", but to have courage. In other versions the moral is usually interpreted to mean "do not believe everything you are told". In the latter case, it could well be a cautionary political tale: The Chicken jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate them for his own benefit, sometimes as supper.
Even my first grade daughter gets that.
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