Dare Obasanjo notes that worries about the security of the cloud are kind of misplaced, given the more prosaic security problems that abound:
Secondly, people are often notoriously bad at assessing riskand often fail to consider that it is more likely that data loss will occur when their personal hardware fails given that the average computer user doesn't have a data backup strategy than it is likely to occur if their information is stored on some Web company's servers. For example, I still have emails from the last decade available to me in my Hotmailand Yahoo! Mailaccounts. On the other hand, my personal archive of mail from the early 2000s which had survived being moved across three different desktop PCs was finally lost when the hard drive failed on my home computer a few months ago.
I never really had a backup strategy before Leopard and Time Machine - I'd do manual backups to CD every so often (and I had one fairly major data loss as a result). On the other hand, every email I've sent or received via gmail is archived for me, and I haven't had to so much as think about it.
It's not that cloud computing poses no risks at all; it's that we already ignore far more likely ones in our day to day computing.
Technorati Tags:
backups, risk