Matt Seidel

Cloud computing is the latest buzzword for the big technology companies, the most vocal being Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. They’re fighting tooth and nail to be the pioneers and prove to the public they can be trusted with their services and your data. But I can’t honestly see why a developer or small/mid-size business would sign up.

You can point to all the glitches that major “cloud” services had in 2008 alone. (CNET’s Rafe Needleman had a great roundup of the 10 worst web glitches of 2008 so far.) Amazon’s S3 outage probably was the biggest. S3 is just one of the services bundled in what the company dubs Amazon Web Services. It sells storage space accessible via the Internet to many Web 2.0 companies that developed sites and services based on this infrastructure. Back in February, this service went down -- bringing offline all these companies that require the data stored on Amazon’s servers.

And we all know what happens when sites go down: they begin to lose money, customers or both.

The list continues with Google Docs, MobileMe and Gmail – all experiencing extended outages.

This is important to think about. As we learned in the past with these companies, when outages occur, they quickly seal their lips, leaving the customer in the dark on status, the cause, and whether their data is safe. In the internal IT world, if the corporate email server or production web site goes down, you can bet an email from some director or VP is asking for specifics – a full report on what happened, why it happened, what’s the damage, and what’s going to happen to prevent it the next time.

Good luck getting that kind of detailed information from Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.

Amazon’s core business is to sell goods. Google‘s core business is search and advertising. Microsoft’s is traditional software. Are these really the companies we should be relying on to offer a highly reliable cloud infrastructure? Not to mention questions of security and data control, and the risks of storing valuable intellectual property outside your company’s firewalls.

I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from using cloud services in the long run. I believe in the possibilities the cloud can provide.

But I think these companies are trying to lock decision-makers into proprietary systems that may continue to cost them more over time when compared to hosting in house.

We’re still in the early stages of providing computing over the Internet and maybe, over time, some of these concerns will become obsolete. But for now, I’ll be staying away from the cloud.

Matt Seidel, a Windows system administrator, blogs at www.atebymonsters.com. Guest posts are the opinions of their authors, and don't necessarily represent the viewpoint of TechFlash or its staff.