Michael Jackson and Cloud Computing

Google, ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN… to name a few were all hit hard this morning as news of Michael Jackson’s death spread like a ‘speed demon’ around the world.

The number of hits that these websites were getting were off the wall with Google believing it was under attack from a virus or spyware application during the peak of searches (between 0240 and 0315 Pacific time).

This begs the question, is it dangerous to rely on the cloud to cope with the demand of such relatively rare incidents? Cloud computing claims to have the technology to cope with such a massive influx of visitors, but has it? After all, we’re still relying on hardware based somewhere – working day and night, and when extra demand is needed how quickly can these dormant virtual machines be brought up?

It’s not black and white, who’s to say the architecture is robust enough to cope? Those promoting the cloud certainly Just can’t get enough of promoting their vision of a cloud based future.

In truth, the cloud is in its childhood, but growing up fast. A well defined, efficient architecture, using best practice techniques is very likely to offer an invincible solution that some current on-site computer rooms and data centres just don’t have.

It’s human nature to get excited about new technology, but persuading business to trust the cloud with their business critical data? It’s bad enough trying to convince business to move their data 25 miles out of their own London offices, let alone persuade them to send it into the cloud to a Stranger in Moscow.

There is no doubt that cloud computing is going to play a large part in the future of data. Once the fear of lack of data privacy is resolved we’ll be saying remember the time when we had all of our data stored on-site?

We’re almost there, whatever happens history will prove that cloud computing is coming of age. I’ll be there!