The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

someone who likes to look for that silver lining cloud. Yeah, and this time we're actually looking at the cloud around the silver lining. That's kind of funny you would say that. Yeah, you know we uh, we've actually done a whole series of articles on cloud computing and two podcasts and um, that's because it's it's such a hot topic. Um. And you know, it's very popular in the news right now and something that I imagine many of our listeners were

probably familiar with even without having check those out. UM. But what we're talking about when we say cloud computing, for those of you who don't know, UM, is basically in a in a very small nutshell, applications and storage that is web based, so you you don't save files

on your hard drive, you don't access applications on your computer. Um, they're all stored online so that you don't have to say, carry a briefcase with a computer in it on the way you know, to and from work, which is kind of a neat idea when you think about it, you know it's all going to be there no matter what

computer you're on. It also means that it makes it much easier to share your information with with other people, so that if you were to save something to a network and allow other people access to that network, then you can all work from the same foundation article or

or document. Um. For anyone who's ever done any collaboration, it can It can be really frustrating to work with computer files because if everyone has a copy of a computer file and everyone's making changes to that to their copy, getting all those copies back together and and and trying to make them coalescent to a new document is very difficult. So cloud computing gives you the opportunity to have multiple people working on the same file at the same time

and uh and and avoid all those those superfluous copies. Yeah, that's true, you can. It's gotten so sophisticated that you can actually merge the documents together even if you are working on at the same time, um, which is which is a far cry from the way things used to be. Exactly, But there is a dark side to cloud computing insert

thunder noise here. Yeah, um right, Because you're talking about sharing files with other people, you know, there is the possibility that you might share them with people that you

don't intend to share them with. Exactly. Yes, So if you have all of these important files stored on someone else's hardware, there's there's a lot of concern about who else might have access to that, whether it's someone who has is a motive to access that in a criminal way, or if it's just someone who works for the system that's storing the information. I mean, it could just be as simple as well. Let's let's let's use some examples. A very popular cloud computing platform right now, um is

Amazon Simple Storage Service or S three. So if you're storing huge amounts of data on Amazon's servers, you probably want to know who has access to that information, like what administrators have access to it, and what what links did Amazon go to to make sure that those people are trustworthy and they're not going to you know, mind that information to find stuff that they could sell to other competitors or I mean, there's a whole host of issues that you have to come to grips with when

you're talking about cloud computing. Yeah, that's true. And you know, of course we're not accusing anybody here that it would. It's just a concept, um that you know, something might go wrong. I mean, you think about we we talked about Google, who hosts a lot of different cloud computing applications, including Google Docs, Gmail. Um. One of the things we talked about that's really good about about that is that Google makes backups, tons of backups of all the data,

so you shouldn't miss anything. But then again, if your document is on say I'm picking a number from the cloud, sixteen different computers with different backups, what happens if somebody, you know, runs off with one of those machines, you know, somebody You're not necessarily somebody from Google. Somebody just gets hold of it, right, just gets hold of the physical machine and not even the file. Yeah, I mean, there,

that's that's an issue. Not granted, these are issues that you have to worry about, even if you're storing information on your own computer. You have to worry about the physical security of your own machines. But there's a lot more apprehension when it's not under your direct control role.

It's it's a trust issue. Do you trust the person who's providing that service to you, but that company that's providing that service to you enough to to say, you know what, they're going to go to all the necessary links to protect my information. UM. Now, in most cases, the answer to that is usually gonna be yes, because if the company is not doing that, they're not going

to be in business very long. All it takes is um uh, one screw up and and you're gonna see all the clients just jump ship and they're either going to go back to the traditional let's store everything on our own machines model, or they'll go to a competitor. So it's in the company's best interest to make sure that security both physical and online are top notch. Absolutely um. And there are other issues to uh, you know, you could possibly have service outages. Oh yeah, we've had a

couple of those this summer. Actually. Yeah. In August eleven, Google had a Gmail outage that affected a lot of people basically North America and India. UM and it was out for about two hours, I guess. Yeah. There's some people reported having difficulty accessing Gmail for up to a day, and there were other issues as well. Some people were

having problems accessing any Google apps at all. Um. I have used Google Docs in the past for non work stuff, UM, my own personal files, and there was I thought, hey, you know what, I'm gonna do some work on this script I'm writing, um and uh, so I tried to access it, couldn't get to my Google Docs account at all. It just wasn't gonna let me access it, and I began to freak out a little bit. Now, my data

ended up being perfectly safe. There was you know, I don't know if they had any crashes on their servers or anything, but but it was completely intact um and once I was able to access it again and uh and really it wasn't an emergency issue for me, So I really didn't have any reason to truly freak out. But for people who are using goaldocs for uh mission

critical type applications, I'm sure that was a huge problem. Yeah, like the going back to college and the computer lab with everybody working on their term papers the night before they're due, and the power goes out in the computer lab and I have have you ever been in that situation I had in the lab when it happened, I actually finished before the and I and I used to work in a company where where you, uh, we had some power issues because the power company was putting in

new lines to the to the neighborhood that the company was in. And yeah, to hear the groans and moans and shrieks of people as the power flickered off for the fifth time that day, and then to hear someone pipe up, and often it was yours truly saying I hope you just saved uh your data. Um, yeah, that was that was a common occurrence. And that can happen on the web. I mean, that's that's what we're talking about here. That stuff can happen on on cloud computing.

Even if it doesn't hit the servers they're storing the information, it might hit the traffic servers that are directing all the traffic to and from those the storage devices. So but there are other issues to worry about. Two Um I was gonna mention. Another one is the location of

the servers where the servers are stored. Um. Not every country has the same laws and regulations about data security that the United States has so and because the cloud isn't geographically oriented, I mean you could you could have a cloud cloud network with servers that are in the United States and servers in Venezuela and servers in Nantarcticle if you really wanted to. Uh cool, be quite cool. Actually,

I bet they wouldn't have any problems with overheating. But anyway, the important thing here is that the laws and regulations might be different in the country that that actually houses the physical machines your data lives on. That might be something worth looking into. I mean, it could really compromise the security of your data. That's true. That's true. Um. And then there's another issue, which is sort of a less pleasant issue in a way to to talk about,

and that's the end user license agreement. Oh, I'm so glad you mentioned that. I totally forgot to write that down in my notes. Well, um, it's this came to light and uh, Google is going to send us a

nasty letter for picking on him today. But um, they just released a new web browser right about the time we record this, a few days before we recorded this, um called Google Chrome, and that that's not really what we're talking about here, But what it brought to light was it pointed out again that Google and its end User License Agreement or ULA for several of its products, including Google Docs UM has information that is a little interesting to UH to consider that they might actually own

the rights here information right. Well, they we should also jump to mention and that they have addressed this, that that's true, they have revised the ULA. But what what Chris is talking about here is that there was a clause in the ULA that essentially said anything that transmitted across through using Google Chrome was Google had rights to

redistribute in just about any way they wanted to. And the lawyers for Google UH explained that what they meant by that was they had the right to display that, to take your information from you, and if you were collaborating with someone else, to display it on their computer screen and let them make changes to it. So you own the rights to this. And as one of their representatives said, and I'm paraphrasing, basically, if you you know, if you have your fantasy football stats on, nobody wants

to see that but you that's your information. We don't you know, we don't own that. We don't own the content, but we we reserve the right to be able to display that if you want it displayed exactly that that is part of the Google docs la. I mean, it's it's and it just happened that they poured it over to Google Chrome and then it's got a lot of attention people read and then they interpret it to mean that that anything I do on Google Chrome is going

to be Google's property forever and ever. Like I guess it is a lot easier to index the world's information if you own it all, well, that would be that would make it a lot easier, yes, but that that's you know, Google has has owned up to that. They've said, you know, this is not what we meant. Let's clarify this, and they they're taking the initiative to you know, go ahead and restructure that for for their customers, which is

which is a good thing. But you should you know, anytime you sign up for a service, and there are lots of new services every day, believe me, because we do a lot of checking into these and I sign up for a lot of them just to see what they're like. But you know, each one of them, when you sign up, they give you the terms and conditions of the service. And you know, it's a long legal document. A lot of people don't read. Do they just click

I agree and sign up. So are you signing away the rights to your spreadsheets or your uh you know, screen a or whatever else your power point presentations? Uh? You know by doing that? Yeah, you know you have to check these things out otherwise, you know, all this information that you store away might end up on somebody else's computer. Yeah. That that kind of goes back to to the first point we were making about, you know, make sure you know who has access to your information. Um.

So these are all important issues. They're not they're not trivial. Uh. But at the same time, do keep in mind that, like we said before, it is in the company's best interests to to make sure that your data remains safe

and secure. Otherwise they don't have a business model. So hopefully we'll be able to say that this dark side is more something that everyone's already thinking about and and trying to address, and not a fundamental flaw in in that in that model, because you know, you know, I don't think I don't think anything's going to stop the incable progress of cloud computing. It's got a lot of it.

It does have a lot of advantages over over storing information on your own computer because honestly, a lot of these places offer gigabytes and gigabytes of storage and it's only going up. I mean, as as storage capacity increases in the cost of it decreases, you're going to see cloud computing services offering to give you, you know, tons more space than you could ever have on your own personal hard drive, which you could use for you know, games and stuff like that if you don't want to

store a lease documents. So um, you know. I don't think that there's any reason to uh to give up on cloud computing based on these things, but there are things to consider when you do sign up for a service exactly. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot Com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you