THE CLOUD IS CLOUDY

A lot of people got a big surprise recently.

Businesses saw Cloud Computing as a way to save money. And who better to trust for that than Amazon.com, right? But Oops. A portion of Amazon’s network recently went down and several businesses were left high and dry for about a day.

But Amazon’s outage doesn’t begin to compare with the current Sony Play Station Network outage. It has been down for a week, and is still down as I write this. The game addicts are going nuts. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Information on 77 million user accounts has been stolen. Names, addresses, and passwords were all swiped. And probably credit card info too, although that was supposedly encrypted.

And to add to the latest Internet issues, yesterday Verizon was experiencing trouble with its 4G network. And Apple is taking heat for storing location data on its iPhones. (Yes, if you are an iPhone user, there is a log of everywhere you have been with your phone in the last year.)

So what is to be learned from this? Don’t blindly trust third parties, period. In fact, don’t even trust yourself. Yes, it is easy to find fault with Sony. But many individuals have been just as negligent, as is demonstrated by the number of PCs that are currently infected with viruses.

As a minimum, the current state of affairs should be a reminder to us all of a couple things: 1) Don’t store mission critical data in only one place, and 2) Limit your exposure on the Internet. Namely, do not reveal personal information that you can’t afford to have compromised. And use a different password for your bank account than you use for your Sony or Facebook account. And lastly, use virtual credit cards for Internet purchases.