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Earlier this month, loyal Google cloud user Thomas Monopoly had his Google account deactivated, with “violation of Terms of Service” cited as the reason.

My Google account was tied to nearly every product Google has developed, meaning that I lost everything in those accounts as well. I was also in the process of consolidating everything into my one Google account. I had actually thought through this a few months ago and determined Google to be a trustworthy, dependable company. So I had imported all of my other email accounts, hotmail, yahoo, etc, into that one gmail account. I had spent maybe four months slowly consolidating my entire online presence, email accounts, banking info, student records, etc, into that one Google account, having determined it to be reliable. That means in terms of information, approximately 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, my Google Voice messages, over 500 articles saved to my Google Reader account for scholarship purposes...

Thomas goes on to state that he is a paid user of Google’s products, even owning shares in the company.  He says, “Why anyone would entrust anything to “The Cloud” after what I have gone through is completely beyond my ability to comprehend.”

It’s true; we are increasingly hearing about people having their Facebook and Google+ accounts deleted because some bright spark thinks that it’s a fake account, and celebrities have to prove themselves to the Twitter authorities before being allowed to tweet openly. 

So - let alone the question of volatile storage - how can the Cloud be used when everything can be deleted or deactivated without notice?  It has been argued that Cloud computing leads to increased probability of the failure of key connections. 

The important thing to note here is that Thomas entrusted ALL of his data to an external third party cloud provider.  While Google is an open-source, fast-moving toolbox, its services are not contracted to the individual users.  Much like a freelancer, Google only needs to work for its own interests. 

US technology site NetworkWorld compares public and private clouds, and states that in situations of high-security (such as the US government): “the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)... claims to run a safer, more reliable cloud-computing platform than Google's... Private cloud services are expected to be popular across the U.S. federal government, not just in the Defense Department. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is encouraging agencies to embrace private cloud computing services as a way of saving taxpayer dollars and improving IT services”.  The same, perhaps, can be proposed to be true for the UK government. 

Small and Medium Businesses have little or no resources for data and IT management, and usually choose to outsource these roles. The Cloud Times argues, “While public cloud’s advantage includes low upfront cost, with practically infinite scalability, it has a significant downside especially in accountability, security, and lock-in. Like their large enterprise counterparts, SMBs must store and protect critical data – often customer data – and ensure that it is readily available when it’s needed the most, frequently driven by government and other compliance mandates. On the other hand private cloud computing allows SMBs to easily deploy a well-managed and secure cloud, built on virtualisation and automation with many of the advantages of cloud computing and less of the public cloud problems.” 

With a change to “Cloud” based configurations, assured connectivity assumes greater importance. As previously mentioned, the support network for public cloud systems can be virtually non-existent or even interrogatory.  With dedicated 24/7 customer (as opposed to consumer) support, however, security can be managed to the requirements of the client, and with their interests at heart.  A bespoke, private server can take steps to verify the identity of the user, and a safeguarding technique can be adopted for when possible breaches come into question.

Call Fitzrovia I.T. today on 0207 874 8827 to discuss your Cloud computing needs.

Photo credit: Flickr user davedehetre