Cloud Computing: The end of days?

As someone who spends entirely too much of my life online you probably wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that I have multiple email addresses. Each of these addresses (I have at least 7) serves a different purpose, and in reality I only use three of them on a regular basis.

Thanks to Gmail’s ability to manage POP3 accounts I’m actually sending/receiving most of my email through one portal. Not only does this save me time (I only have to check one portal for my email) but Gmail also offers me (virtually) limitless storage (I’m currently using less than 1% of my storage space). That’s not too shabby!

The obvious downside to this plan is that Gmail appears to be less and less reliable these days. Yesterday was the third day this year in which some part of Gmail was down.

I’ve also noticed that Hotmail has been finicky over the past week. My Hotmail account is probably ten years old and I can honestly say that I’ve never really had problems with it. However, I’ve noticed two things this week which are bothering me:

1. I consistently have to type my password twice. This is annoying, as I’m 100% sure I type it correctly the first time.
2. The “Delete” button is either really slow, or there’s a bug which forces me to click the message first then click the delete button. The delete button used to simply delete the message currently loaded in the window.

Granted, Hotmail hasn’t had a huge service outage that I can remember – but it’s a trend that I’m uncomfortable with.

With all of the problems we’ve been seeing with our email lately, I have to wonder what we (i.e. the IT/Web industry) are doing wrong. I’m no expert in cloud computing, but we as a society are becoming so reliant on our service providers that consumers are powerless to prevent these kinds of catastrophes. This year we’re having problems with our email. . . what is going to happen next year? What happens if we’re involved in a DOS attack?

I find that I struggle to find the answer to that question. On the one hand, we’re trusting a small handful of large companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft) to manage our data because they’re (presumably) more reliable than a larger number of small companies. This saves us money and, in theory,  offers us peace of mind. On the other hand, we’re giving our most precious commodity (i.e. our data) to these large companies and hoping that they allow us to access it. There’s little we can do when we’re denied access, and we have no guarantee that our data is backed-up and secure.

I’m clearly taking a pessimistic view of cloud computing and the title of this post is deliberately controversial. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I get paid to develop web applications and that I heavily rely on other companies to store my data. In the grand scheme of things, being denied access to our email for a few hours isn’t the worst thing that could happen. But am I the only one worried?