OT: Shocks in the cloud!

[banana boy]

The last few weeks rocked my world ... how about you? Were you as shocked as I was?

I’m a big fan of the cloud. Always available, access from anywhere, low cost storage of content and critical back-ups means as much to me as a media production person as it does to the blue-chip or government CIO seeking that secure everything-from-anywhere utopia for his company’s workforce.

I use Soundcloud a lot, iCloud a bit, and Dropbox all the time. My accounting system is in the cloud. My web-site lives there. Everywhere I go, I advocate moving to this new data model. Why leave your data hanging around your local unmanaged drives when it could be in a multi-million dollar managed environment that addresses power availability (a real issue for us here at the bottom of Africa), a safe air-conditioned (even green) environment, regular multiple managed backups, physical and virtual security, transparent authorised access from any browser on any device, latest advances in database and server technologies and their licensing ... etc etc.

That’s why I was so shocked at what happened ten days ago to one of the world’s biggest discs in the sky: the 180m user mega-service Megaupload. Here’s just one of the stories on this, and here’s another from the BBC. Short version: The US FBI shut the service down overnight, confiscating $50m in servers and infrastructure across nine countries, arresting the management (in New zealand!) because some users had some pirate content on it.

OK, so maybe there was more ...

From the BBC story: “The charges included, conspiracies to commit racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering”, and “... the accused had pursued a business model designed to promote the uploading of copyrighted works.” A statement said: “The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content, and publicised their links to users throughout the world. By actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicise infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicise such content on the Megaupload site. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users."

Ironically, this all happened a day after the site like Wikipedia and many others, had deliberately shut down for a day to protest SOPA.

This terrifies me!

It’s not that I advocate piracy - my business is music and sound for picture, and it’s not that I’m saying Megaupload was clean - they called the allegations “grotesquely overblown”. It’s just that the idea that the by-now essential cloud storage and sharing services upon which my business depends could be this fragile and vulnerable scares me to my bones.

Imagine somewhere in their petabytes of disc space, your on-line service provider actually hosts someone else’s pirated content on the same servers they so efficiently offer to you for your legitimate business needs. Imagine a government agency - maybe not even the one from your own country - decides to act on this fact. Imagine that without notice your essential service gets shut down, servers and storage get attached, never to be seen again and you are left with nothing but a broken link! What would that mean to your business?

So how should I back up? How should I store the stuff I need to access from everywhere? How should I ship large soundtracks or picture files I need to share with my clients? How should I revise my cloud affinity?

How should you?

(From my blog).