Another blow for cloud computing: T-Mobile SideKick user data to the garbage

Witnessing a system outage, application issue or technology failure is never fun, unless you’re trying to break it in the lab. However, watching the proliferation of failures impacting the evolution of an entire technology sector is downright painful. Over the course of the last week we’ve seen yet another outage tied to cloud computing, which is adding fuel to the same question in many IT leadership team members' minds—“Can I rely on the cloud?”

As you've most likely heard, this week T-Mobile subscribers who use the Sidekick smartphone have suffered personal data loss that could potentially have been prevented. Many of the articles that I’ve read are speculating on the source of the issue. Regardless, the core selling point of cloud computing is the replication/backup of your data in multiple locations (within the “cloud”). Why? Well, for times when there are major failures…oh yeah, kind of like this one!

Between Google’s Gmail outages, the multiple Salesforce.com blackouts, and a small handful of Microsoft Azure outages that have been publicized in the news, who can blame people for questioning this? Are these large providers taking the right approach? Do they need to think differently? After all, every business operates differently, and therefore treats their data and applications differently. Hopefully we’ll start to see these types of issues subside as the underlying approaches and technologies mature.

Personally, I think this gives more opportunity for the smaller service providers who are more committed to the success of their customers than they are to the number of subscribers they can add every quarter. Believe it or not, that simple difference in motivating factors can play a huge part in the quality of a solution.

Disagree? Let me know. And if you're interested in reading more on this, I did an interview with SeattlePI.com on the topic earlier this week. You can check out the article on their web site.