Hey! You! Get Off of my Cloud

Given the current Cloud hypefest in the blogosphere, a warning for devotees of Cloud Computing comes from the direction of Chris Brogan:

Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.

And that’s it.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

He eventually got back in after 24 hours and quite a lot of effort, but there are 2 lessons here for anyone thinking of handing over responsibility for their important services to The Cloud at the moment:

(i) Don't. It's not really open for business yet.

(ii) Especially, don't do it with free services - even Google, or at least not with any critical path stuff - you pays for what you gets and no SLA means just that.

It's interesting - how many other areas of life would you advise yourself to put all your eggs in one basket?

(Update - I've been reading some of the comments on other blogs about this with a mounting sense of wonder at the sheer naivete of some users. For anything that is important: Firstly, always plan for redundancy in your systems - have an online and on computer service that are synched. Secondly, do frequent backups to a 3rd source. Thirdly, if its important, pay for it. Ad funded services are responsive to the advertisers, not to the users - its that pipers / tune thing. )

Here endeth the lesson........ until the next example.