Sean's Blog

With the recent “issues” Microsoft/Danger have seen with their backend to the Sidekick devices, cloud computing has been brought into question by many people, and yet, I feel no different about clouds than I did prior to the meltdown. To be more precise, “cloud computing” has two different meanings to me, one to consumers (i.e., John Doe) and one to organizations (i.e., Any Big Enterprise, Inc.). For consumers, cloud computing is the ability to have your data on any device, anywhere in the world, without knowing or caring where said data comes from. And that’s the problem.

I’m ignoring “enterprise cloud computing,” because it’s not really relevant here. The ability to carry all your e-mails, appointments, et cetera around and have it synchronized across all your devices is a beautiful thing enabled by today’s technology. The downside to it, of course, is the dependence placed upon the cloud, and a few very unlucky people got to see what happens when the clouds go away. What happened was completely inexcusable, of course, and the inability to store data locally (in a persistent manner, anyway) made things even worse. But it’s a great experience to learn from. Cloud computing is great, but it shouldn’t be the end-all be-all for people. Backups—or in the case of the Sidekick, actually being able to create backups—are crucial and necessary. Being able to access the data without an Internet connection is equally as crucial. And these are two areas where cloud computing will continue to frustrate its users.

I don’t use GMail, because I have no desire to be tied to it in any way, regardless of the various methods of copying GMail data to a local host. I run my own mail server, and with a copy of one directory, I can have all my messages appear just the same, albeit on a completely different server. Backups are a breeze as well. Dovecot does a great job of providing access to all my e-mail clients, including my mobile devices. I am not dependent on Danger, RIM, or Palm for anything. And that’s the way I like it. In essence, I have created my own cloud—an IT buzzword I have come to hate, both in its abundance of irrelevance and its technical downfalls.

Not everyone can (or should) run their own services, but everyone needs to backup, synchronize, or otherwise copy their stuff. The cloud is not a solution to this problem, much as RAID isn’t a solution to a backup problem. Most people probably won’t learn the appropriate lesson from this mess, but at least I can say I’ve done my part to educate them.