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The concept of Cloud Computing has been suffering a few little setbacks of late. Those who have been claiming that most all applications and data storage will soon move from devices to the internet and remote servers (that is, the “cloud”) have been working overtime trying to explain away the fears of consumers and IT pros alike due to several high profile outages over the last month.

First there have been several sustained outages for Google’s Gmail. While in the end they only lasted a few hours and did not do any long term damage, having your email client up and accessible at all times is quite essential to most enterprise users as well as being a major promise made by Cloud backers and the outages have made them nervous. There have also been several periods where Gmail was up but the contacts lists were not available which made it more difficult to use. These situations did little to inspire confidence in the Cloud.

Then there were numerous Twitter outages and Google Docs hiccups over the last few weeks, as well as a somewhat lackluster response to Google’s new Wave application, a Cloud based collaboration tool..however, all of that was nothing compared to the recent T-Mobile Sidekick outage.

Ina Fried at Beyond Binary reports the following…

A week ago, though, Microsoft’s Danger unit experienced a huge outage that left many T-Mobile Sidekick users without access to their calendar, address book, and other key data. That’s because the Sidekick keeps nearly all its data in the cloud as opposed to keeping the primary copy on the devices themselves.

Things got even worse on Saturday, as Microsoft said in a statement that data not recovered thus far may be permanently lost. It’s not immediately clear how many people lost their data. The outage earlier in the week affected a broad swath of Sidekick users, though many had data return during the week.

While outages in the cloud computing world are common (one need only look at recent issues with Twitter or Gmail), data losses are another story. And this one stands as one of the more stunning ones in recent memory.

I doubt too many enterprise users are toting around Sidekicks, but that is hardly the point. Data loss is the biggest nightmare connected to Cloud computing. If that is seen as even an unlikely possibility then Cloud computing will never take off the way that Google, Microsoft (using their Azure platform) hope that it will.

I know many people will say “back up your data, no matter where it is located” and they are totally right, but no one is eager to use system that has a history of undependability and data loss, even if they back things up daily (and who among us REALLY do that consistently?).

Sounds like there is a lot of work to be done before Cloud computing is ready for prime time, certainly more than companies like Google have been leading us to believe.

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Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).