Cloud poison

Last week I wrote about the need to trust in cloud services and likened the need to do so to our trust of the food production industries.  Many people though worry about cloud services because of "glitches" that occur.   These may be operational failures or security vulnerabilities that are discovered.

I once sat, a couple of years ago, with an upper manager who was lambasting Googles services because they had just had a two hour outage.  He used this as an example of why cloud services would never be appropriate and we should continue to provide our own services because they were more reliable.  I pointed out that the Google issue had been just two hours in the last 5 years but that did not shake his view.  I then pointed out that once a month the company's exchange servers were shut down and restarted to ensure consistent functionality.  This shut down period added up through just one year made for a significantly greater unavailability for our services than Googles had been in the last 5.  He still was not convinced and I understood at that point this was not about logic or reality it was about personal conviction and comfort with a bought object being touchable.

The same manager and multiple others I have spoken to also delightfully point out to me every security issue that the cloud services are accused of.  Once again they use this as a reason why we should continue to do it ourselves.  Our services though were based on products that also have security issues and frequently needed patching or upgrading.  Without exception this took a long time to achieve both through lack of resources and through the complications of actually deploying the required changes.  I have seen it take years to deliver these updates, and all that time the company remains vulnerable.  With cloud services almost as soon as a vulnerability becomes known the service is patched to protect against it, in most cases without the user ever being aware.

Returning to my food metaphor these things are like the occasional food scare we see.  The event may be accidental or deliberate and they often frighten us off the particular food for a short period, however none of us return to just growing our own food.  We trust the food industry and its regulators to keep us safe and advise us on how to avoid issues.