Thursday, February 25, 2010

How safe are my data on the cloud?

I am a very big fan of Google and all its products. Yes, you could have sensed that from my posts here. I have developed few apps using Google’s App Engine, a service for developers for writing and hosting apps on Google’s infrastructure (cloud). I have been using it right from its initial days and have quite some volume of data on the cloud. Today, all of a sudden, all my apps went down. Google app engine’s status page has confirmed that there is an unscheduled outage for the past 2+ hrs starting 7:53 A.M. PST and still not resolved. Plenty of apps around the globe are suffering due to this problem. An update at 9:30 A.M. PST says that there is a problem with backup datacenter. Then, at 9:48 A.M. PST, all the applications were brought up in read-only. Currently, all write operations are failing with “CapabilityDisabledError: Datastore writes are temporarily unavailable. Please see http://code.google.com/status/appengine for more information.” . Waiting for it to be back online.

Google App Engine The issue is with the data center now. Oops! Are my data safe on the cloud? It is the very same question which distances many people from the cloud. What has be to done to make the cloud environment more reliable? Will people gain confidence on it over time? Post your thoughts.

Update: At 10:09 A.M. PST, all the applications were back online. First thing, I am going to take a backup of all my data. Check out what Google has to say about this issue.

-- Varun

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2 comments:

  1. MurugaprabuFebruary 25, 2010 at 12:38 PM

    Good catch Varun. This is one of the major disadvanatages of cloud computing. How safe is the data on the cloud. People have to come up with some better solution to circumvent this problem.

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  2. JAYAPRAKASH JPFebruary 25, 2010 at 8:44 PM

    As users and developers find new ways of applying cloud technologies, there will be new expectations about security and privacy. For instance, Twisted Pair Solutions of Seattle proposes to provide cloud computing resources for state and local agencies to link up disparate public safety radio systems—a novel but difficult-to-predict usage of cloud computing but also one that makes the cloud part of mission and safety-critical systems. The expectations for security, privacy, reliability, and so on will be different in some respects for voiceover-IP (VoIP) radio systems than for social networking aspects of the cloud.

    This raises the question:
    how do we manage risk when we
    don’t fully understand what we’re
    trying to protect or guard against?

    ReplyDelete