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Beware of the Cloud

October 20, 2014

You can’t go a single day without hearing something about the “cloud.” The sad part is that 50% of people have no clue what the cloud is and believe it is impacted by weather. Dropbox has had its fair share of problems this past week. From a bug that deletes files from your storage to having over 7 million logon IDs compromised. Then again, that’s nothing compared to iCloud which appears to have allowed hundreds of brute force attacks without locking out the account resulting in the public display of nude selfies. Yes, it is now fixed – but Apple knew about this long ago and did nothing.

What does all of the recent news tell us? I’m not so sure the cloud is the ultimate answer to all your problems and where we want to go for future computing. The cloud can be a wonderful technical alternative. Unfortunately, most people simply trust the service provider and don’t understand how it is accessing or even selling information about your usage or data contents. Make sure you encrypt any data with your own encryption key before you hand it over to a cloud storage provider. Don’t be naive and think the provider has your best interests at heart.

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