CLOUD COMPUTING (2)

Readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of cloud computing, though I admit that much of that reservation is fired by gut feeling rather than technical knowledge. However, my inarticulate scepticism has been reinforced by recent events concerning Wikileaks. Amazon, the U.S. company that was hosting many of Wikileaks' servers, suddenly "discovered" (under prompting from the U.S. Government?) that Wikileaks had broken its standard terms and conditions of service, and disconnected them without notice. EveryDNS, the domain name company responsible for turning the domain name Wikileaks.org into a unique IP address that the internet could recognise, followed suit.

Wikileaks has quickly become a global organisation, with an army of unofficial supporters, and so was able to be up and running almost immediately from other servers, using a Swiss domain name (Wikileaks.ch). An everyday small business is unlikely to have access to such resources. As cyberspace becomes an ever more important part of a business' activities (whether representing itself, sourcing sales leads, or simply communicating internally, or with others), the knowledge that hosters with detailed small-print terms and conditions can obliterate your electronic footprint at the touch of a button, ought to give one pause for thought. Cloud computing looks decidely less attractive today than it did two weeks ago.

Walter Blotscher

P.S. I have just read that Visa and Mastercard are refusing to process the payments made to Wikileaks (which is financed by donations). Processing has been "suspended" for a week, while they investigate. What are the odds that the suspension turns out to be for a bit longer?