The Cloud

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Cloud

  • "And if it's gone, it's gone."

    Exactly, and wait until this happens the first time to a very visible company out there that uses it, and it WILL happen, for all the reasons that you mention, and when it does, the "cloud" will end up going the same way as the "hula hoop". It's a passing fancy right now, that's all. IMHO. 😀

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • Ahh the embarrassment of looking back at our attempts to predict the future from the past. The truth is Amazon does care because they have made it their business to care about not loosing our data, and their business is as much about reputation as anything. I probably wont be moving my servers to the cloud for other reasons, but I do believe my data would be as safe or safer in an amazon storage account than it is locally.

  • krowley (6/21/2012)


    Ahh the embarrassment of looking back at our attempts to predict the future from the past. The truth is Amazon does care because they have made it their business to care about not loosing our data, and their business is as much about reputation as anything. I probably wont be moving my servers to the cloud for other reasons, but I do believe my data would be as safe or safer in an amazon storage account than it is locally.

    Oh really? Well if that is really true, then why do they state this right in the Amazon Terms of Service agreement about security?

    5.3 Security. We do not guarantee that Your Files will not be subject to misappropriation, loss or damage and we will not be liable if they are. You're responsible for maintaining appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Files.

    Why store your precious files there to start with if they can't guarantee anything anyway? You are right back to square one and doing it yourself anyway. 😀

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • Travis,

    Its all lawyer speak. The lawyers require companies put that kind of thing in to CYA and because it keeps them employed. Also like any powerful tool it can be used wrongly. If I sold chainsaws I would have to include in my terms that I don't guarantee the chainsaw will not slip and cut off your leg, not because I would not design every safety feature I could into my chainsaw but because I know someone out there will find a way to disable my safety features and cut off their leg and then they will blame me.

    From the main S3 page:

    Data stored in Amazon S3 is secure by default; only bucket and object owners have access to the Amazon S3 resources they create. Amazon S3 supports multiple access control mechanisms, as well as encryption for both secure transit and secure storage on disk. With Amazon S3’s data protection features, you can protect your data from both logical and physical failures, guarding against data loss from unintended user actions, application errors, and infrastructure failures. For customers who must comply with regulatory standards such as PCI and HIPAA, Amazon S3’s data protection features can be used as part of an overall strategy to achieve compliance. The various data security and reliability features offered by Amazon S3 are described in detail below.

    Also from this page and more what I was talking about:

    Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. To help ensure durability, Amazon S3 PUT and COPY operations synchronously store your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If corruption is detected, it is repaired using redundant data. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.

    I know my local data is not stored in multiple locations instantly. We upload database backups to S3 overnight and push hourly backups to a different server from the database server, but this is a far cry from the kind of redundancy amazon provides.

    We as a company happen to like controlling our own servers. It works for us and makes economic sense, and we really don't NEED the kind of redundancy Amazon offers, but that does not mean Amazon servers can't be trusted.

    Though I will grant that if I were to move my servers to amazon I would do the opposite of what I do now, and push my backups down from amazon to a local backup devise every night, but that's just the DBA in my and DBA's are paid to be paranoid.

  • Hmmmm....maybe, but like Steve says the only thing I would ever put out there are photos, nothing else. Also, seems like a real big target for hackers as well. 😀

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • This editorial shows its age.

    I am not working with Amazon too often, but I do work with Azure. Microsoft does indeed triplicate every machine you have and if one of them is out of commission - say a server failure -, a backup VM is seamlessly activated and Azure clones it to keep three copies. I have not heard that this failed and that someone lost data due to Azure failure.

    You do need your backup (or better backups) in case you lose your data due to your own mistake. That's where it becomes difficult and expensive because Microsoft charges you by data that you download form Azure. So you can have a backup server on your site, off the Cloud, but if you have significant data volumes, better be ready for hefty bills.

  • Using Azure for cloud storage is way too cost prohibitive for most companies today. Only the big boys can usually afford it. I would go with Microsoft SkyDrive long before Azure. 😀

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • TravisDBA (6/21/2012)


    Using Azure for cloud storage is way too cost prohibitive for most companies today. Only the big boys can usually afford it. . . .

    I am letting the finance guys worry about that. 😀

  • One thing about a non-MS company. There are implementations out there that are cheap reliable and fast for little money. However, they require that you do the work as do the Azure and Amazons of this world.

    There is no free lunch out on the cloud and for many it might not be cost avoidance to use it.

    Big boys can use it, but they also are advised to get their own hardware if they are too large. It is crazy!

    M.

    Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!

  • If Steve worked with our company, he'd be in a lot of trouble. Seriously, the number of problems we've had because users haven't rebooted there machine in ages is ridiculous. :pinch:

    I used to call my self The Master on forums, then I entered the IT industry and realised how much I still have to learn.

  • Boltz42 (6/21/2012)


    If Steve worked with our company, he'd be in a lot of trouble. Seriously, the number of problems we've had because users haven't rebooted there machine in ages is ridiculous. :pinch:

    As my 5th grade teacher used to say a lot "Clean the blackboard once in a while and start over." 😀

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • Boltz42 (6/21/2012)


    If Steve worked with our company, he'd be in a lot of trouble. Seriously, the number of problems we've had because users haven't rebooted there machine in ages is ridiculous. :pinch:

    What problems? I usually reboot on critical Windows patches, but not always. Once a quarter seems sufficient to me.

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