Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Featured

One Small Step For Intellectual Property, One Giant Leap Backwards For The Cloud

Many companies exist solely in The Cloud, such as Amazon, and many more use the web platform to provide goods, provide crm and cloud computing solutions or even services such as Google Docs to millions of users world-wide. In the past weeks, many people will already have read many stories centring on the Megaupload take-down and the continuing war for the Internet.  Most of these stories have no doubt been focused on why the take-down was justified or why it was unfair to users who were using the service for legitimate purposes. Many users lost much when Megaupload was shut down, but more important is the drastic effect this will have on the future of Cloud computing.

So What Is The Cloud?

The Cloud is a term being used more and more in computing circles. While there are many definitions, a simplistic view of The Cloud as a place in cyberspace where some computing service takes place is good enough.  Many companies exist solely in The Cloud, such as Amazon, and many more use the web platform to provide goods, or even services – such as Google Docs – to millions of users world-wide. So The Cloud is important and is being used more and more as it becomes more reliable.

Reliability and Ubiquity

Regardless of your opinion of the site itself, many of its users were legitimate. Some artists used Megaupload exclusively to distribute their music; it was a very useful platform for making files available via the Internet. The Internet is so ubiquitous these days that it is not unreasonable to place your files in a digital locker such as Megaupload and expect that wherever you go, you can still get at your data. This is taken even further with services like Google Docs, where not only are the files available on-line but they are authored there as well.

Google protects against losing their customers’ data by replicating it to several geographically remote locations. Many companies use the Amazon web services; reliability is a key concern here as well. If companies are to trust their business to run on Amazon’s servers, will their data be safe?  With replication and virtualisation, the answer is probably yes. If businesses are to trust The Cloud, they need to know that their data will be safe there.  This is the digital age where almost everything is done on-line, whether it is ordering more stock or reporting sales figures, and in these modern times many companies will suffer heavily if they lose access to the Internet. However, because many processes have offline fall-backs, this is not a complete disaster – in  most cases, business can still carry on uninterrupted, although far more inefficiently.  It would be a far different issue if the data needed for everyday business was kept on-line as well; what good is knowing that the data is safe if you can’t access it?

Disasters, Thin-clients and Internet Dependence

So with Google, Amazon and other similar companies offering to keep your data for you with such a high level of security, it has actually become more likely for local hardware failure to be the cause of data loss.  If one of Google’s hard drives dies, the data is simply re-replicated elsewhere. However, for companies who have kept away from The Cloud, a flood, fire, break-in or even just some old hardware reaching the end of its life is likely to result in many problems and probably some data loss.  Even a system like RAID, which is supposed to keep your data replicated, is not infallible, especially in the case of a natural disaster.  As companies experience these losses, the experience may lead them to consider putting their data on-line.  Due to the complexity inherent in keeping an on-line system synchronised with an offline one, many of the companies going down this route are choosing to put all their eggs in the Cloud basket.

Not so long ago, a new computer would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That age has long since gone; in the modern world, information is far more valuable than hardware.  For large companies, if a computer fails it is not worth the time and money to fix and it is often cheaper just to buy a new machine to allow work to resume as soon as possible.  To this end, many schools and businesses are choosing to use thin-clients, which have little processing power of their own, and use remote servers to do all the work.  It has been proposed that in the future no individuals and few businesses will own physical hard drives; most people will just have a simple terminal to access a web platform with all the functionality in a modern computer is all that is needed and with the recent advancements in system-on-chip devices this seems all the more likely.  Why bother with the expense and risk of hosting everything yourself, if Google, and those like them, can do it so much better than you ever could, for free?  Even schoolchildren forgetting to bring in their homework could be a thing of the past with systems like Google Docs – that is, providing the Internet is reliable enough.

What the Megaupload take-down means for The Cloud

More companies are choosing to use The Cloud every day and leaving the hardware worries, backups and upgrades to Cloud services.  For the last few years the world has been looking towards Cloud computing as the future, but the take-down of Megaupload with no prior warning has taken The Cloud back from the precipice of success and threatens this kind of advanced usage.

The Megaupload take-down proved that, with no prior warning, a Cloud service can be taken offline due to its misuse by other users.  What does this say for other services?  Will Google be the next victim because it indexes sites which may contain illegal content and because it owns Youtube, which contains infringing videos?  What will Amazon’s users do if they are taken down with no warning because some users were running bootleg movies, drugs or even child pornography through the same service?  Is it fair to remove the entire service, punishing the legitimate users as if they were criminals?  In the case of Megaupload, not only was the service taken offline but the go-ahead was given to erase all the data without allowing legitimate users to claim back their data.  For a business, losing all their sales information with no warning would cause havoc if they ever got audited.  Indeed, this precedent could be used to close down a bank because some of its clients were criminals.  Should we all be left without a service because some choose to abuse it?

Conclusion

The take-down of Megaupload is a dangerous warning of the power that law enforcement agencies have, and it proves that the greatest asset of The Cloud – its reliability – is no longer unquestionable.  The trust that people had in The Cloud has been damaged severely, and it will take many years of hard work to win back.  If the FBI or other similar institutions can take down a service because a sub-set of the user base is abusing it, then the chances of something as ubiquitous as Google being here tomorrow become no more certain than the flip of a coin.

Written By

I am a technology enthusiast who loves interesting and exciting technologies such as neural impulse actuators and NVidia 3D vision. I also have a strong interest in security and distributed systems. I am currently in my third year at The University of Southampton for MEng Software Engineering.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Danny

    February 20, 2012 at 5:42 am

    Great article!
    I think it’s outrageous what the FBI has done to mega-upload and it’s customers.
    In stead of shutting down a bank because some of the clients are criminal I would like to take it one step further. Lets kill all dogs because some of them bite humans. And while we are at it let’s put all humans in prison because some of them do bad things.

    This is not justice, the fbi is using their monopoly on physical power/force to fight for the few fossils of the MPAA and others who have massive wealth and don’t want to change their outdated ways.
    With this move (and others like guantanamo bay) The U.S. has totally lost it’s right to point a denigrating finger to China when it comes to human rights. As China is moving in the right direction but America is going totally in the wrong direction.

    • Dexter Lowe

      February 20, 2012 at 12:39 pm

      thanks, I like your extension of my analogy to locking up all humans. There is an interesting debate running at the moment as to whether access to the Internet itself is a human right. But the treatment of the owners of a site that complied with takedown requests when issued really is a horrible overstepping of privileges on the part of the FBI. It appears that they are now being accused of hiding the illegal activity by removing the search function but by leaving it there they were facilitating it, this really is a case of dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t so what were they expected to do.

  2. Ryan Hawan

    February 20, 2012 at 11:35 am

    We are all wetness of how the cursor died with birth of the mouse. Now Cloud is about to change how businesses operates, we can now set a virtual customer database user can access anywhere in the world, shop online, and even keep important family pictures securely over the web. Thanks to cloud computing! for more IT networking and IT networking news

  3. stella

    February 27, 2012 at 8:04 am

    its very secure way that clouds works and give us a security to continue our business at online market.

  4. Dexter Lowe

    February 27, 2012 at 6:22 pm

    Many cloud services are secure from hackers true, but virtual security does not help if the FBI can shut down your server or indeed the entire hosting company because of the actions of others.

  5. Vic

    March 13, 2012 at 10:03 pm

    There’s something about the idea of storing all my important files in the cloud. I feel that, no matter how secure it’s supposed to be, my documents could be at risk.

    Maybe I am old fashioned but I feel that your most important files shouldn’t really be kept on the internet, not to mention in the hands of another company.

    • Dexter Lowe

      March 14, 2012 at 12:55 am

      Probably a good approach to take. The cloud promoters have been trying to convert people for years, and this just proves that at least for now, you definitely have the right idea.

  6. Nicholle Olores

    April 16, 2012 at 6:26 am

    Such a a brilliant post. I never been heard about Cloud before but my friends told me about this that this is truly great. Love to try this out!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You May Also Like

Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing has become an entire industry that has its metrics and tools to measure the progress and performance of a website and increase...

Tech

In the era of rapid digital growth, organizations need efficient infrastructure management. Shifting towards cloud-native infrastructure has become a strategic business need in the...

Tech

Businesses these days have to ensure they have the right solutions and services in place if they want to benefit from efficiency and aid...

Digital Marketing

Blog posts are informative, engaging, and provide high value. Businesses can use blogs to connect with customers and meet their needs. Additionally, blogs act...