[ngw] Cloud Mentality - I disagree

[Joseph Marton]

Ah, yes, and because the cloud is big, it can't fail, right?  Let's see.
 About a month and a half ago a key production NetWare server here abended
during the day thanks to Java.  Other than that short 5-10 minute outage
while the server rebooted, when's the last time it went down during the day?
 Oh I don't know... maybe 2008?  In comparison, how many times has various
portions of the Google network been down in 2010?  How about 2009?  I'd say
many more.  And for how long each time?  Definitely more than 5 or 10
minutes.  I'm sure Google probably has a few more resources than my company
(50 person financial services company) yet that hasn't prevented outages.

Just because the cloud is big doesn't mean there can't be failures.  There
can and will be.  So when you take that out of the equation, you now have to
look at possibilities of Internet connection failures.  And remember, this
doesn't just mean that the connection to your ISP is down.  I've had a
couple of "failures" where our connection in Chicago to Verizon remained up,
but an issue further upstream caused an outage.  Heck not even two weeks ago
there was a problem where a small Chinese ISP's router started advertising
routes via BGP, which other routers accepted, causing thousands of networks
to essentially go down because routers all over the world sent those
networks' traffic to China instead of the appropriate locations.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Chinese-ISP-hijacks-bits-of-the-web-975344.html

<http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Chinese-ISP-hijacks-bits-of-the-web-975344.html>This
is just how fragile the Internet is.  Now think about it, if a company had
most of its resources in the cloud and the cloud got hit by something
similar to what happened recently, now suddenly the company may not have
access to key systems.  So why go through that risk if the cloud itself
isn't necessarily any more stable than internal systems?

Joe

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 1:34 AM, Richard Bliss <rbliss at gwava.com> wrote:

>    You second point talked about connection as another reason to avoid the
> cloud mentality. You ask if we have ever had Internet outages? The better
> questions is, how many times have you had system failures within your own
> organizations due to mechanical or human error compared to the number of
> times you haven't been able to get on the Internet when you needed to.
>
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