Promise and Peril of the Cloud

This is the view out the front door of my house at 0915AM on Saturday, 06 February 2010.  I just finished a leisurely breakfast and am now sitting in my warm study, jotting down a few thoughts on my blog.  And I’m scared.

Nearly everything I do is in the cloud.  My data, my applications, the games I play, the sites I depend on for my news, the social networks that keep me in touch with my friends.  All those things depend on a very old, very vulnerable infrastructure.  See the wires in the picture above?  They may have been strung before I was born, but they carry the 21st century in them.  Electricity, landline phone, the power that keeps cell phone towers working, cable television, internet, they’re all right there.  By “right there,” I mean, “right there where a squirrel can chew through them or a branch loaded with snow can snap them in two”.  If that happens, I guess I’ll dig out paper and pencil and start my “Amish in America” blog.

As much as I love the interconnected world I live and work in, the aging infrastructure and lack of “Plan B” is starting to bother me.  When I try to talk to people about this though, I sometimes feel like I’m shouting, “The king has no clothes!”.  They just don’t want to hear it. 

Sure, our data centers are all secured like a fortress and have triple redundant, armor coated, fiber optic lines, but what about the last mile?  That’s what has me wondering where we keep our flashlight and if know where the manual pencil sharpener is…

[Addendum:  In the balance, the good and potential of the cloud FAR outweighs any potential hazards.  I have no desire to go back to managing my own storage network or even to scribbling notes on paper, with pencil nub.  My point is, we need to be realistic and have a "Plan B" in mind, for mission critical applications.  Squirrels chew and snow falls, know what I mean?]