Security – off with the clouds?

Data loss is an all-too-common theme in the news these days. The recent Sidekick outage, however, stands out for several reasons, most importantly because the data loss affected both customer contact information and customer files, such as images and schedules. Let's put aside who is at fault in this particular situation and whether cloud computing introduces data loss risks - which ultimately became the focus of this controversy - and instead look at this from a consumer's point of view.

As consumers, we have two options for storing our digital data: locally or elsewhere in the cloud. A good analogy would be the option of storing your savings under your mattress or in an online bank. Of course, that decision is a personal one, but it is also commonly confused by technical discussions that are not really interesting or important to laymen. In the case of the Sidekick outage, discussion has been skewed because subtle but important differences in the value of customer data - such as personal files - compared to application-specific data - such as IDs, passwords and the like - are often overlooked.