Dark Side of the Cloud
There are a couple of notable dark sides of cloud computing that frighten me. The first is the amount of personal information which is being gathered and held by corporations in the cloud and the potential for the misuse of that information either through the hacking of corporate sites or through the carelessness of the corporations involved. Unfortunately the federal government has not enacted regulations on what information can be required from people by corporations in the cloud. Recently when debugging a problem with my daughter’s Windows system, in order to access the Microsoft support database, I was required to “join” the Microsoft support network. This required my providing personal information such as birth date, address and phone number which had nothing to do with simply giving me access to the Microsoft Windows question and answer database, but it was required by the process, no getting around it. At this time, a corporation can require any information it wants in order to provide their online services. This information becomes resident in the cloud and we have no control over it and how it is used. And the terms and conditions that people have to agree to to access services is non negotiable – if one does not agree to the terms or supply the information requested, one does not receive the service. The government should be stepping up to control how personal information is gathered and used in cloud computing, but the industry has developed so fast that the government is far behind the technology and the corporate lobbies are strong opponents.
The second dark side I see is the greatly increased potential for disaster by society’s being almost totally dependent on electronic communication to function. This means that a major power outage as the result of a terrorist strike (nuclear power plant?) or ice storm or storm surge to the eastern seaboard (especially Manhattan) would shut down our economy and people’s ability to function for an extended period of time. Last year, parts of Connecticut were without power for weeks in early November due to a snowstorm. If that had been February and the location had been the lower Hudson Valley or Boston, the effect on people’s lives would have been far beyond the local outage.
The above said, cloud computing is here to stay.