Fearing the cloud- services that go away
We talk about embracing the cloud a lot here, Kevin’s long cloud journey was a popular one. There are many good reasons for adopting a cloud computing philosophy and we won’t go into those again here. There are also some good reasons to fear the cloud and one of the reasons most often heard is that you give up control over your own stuff when you move to the cloud. Rather than rehash that old argument because good cases can be made for both sides of it, a news item from our friends at WebWorkerDaily makes the case for us.
Two popular productivity services, I Want Sandy and Stikkit, both free and covered by WWD in the past, are shutting down for good on December 8. Rael Dornfest, the genius behind both of these cloud services, has accepted a job at Twitter and will shut them down on December 8 due to the inability to continue providing them. This is great news for Mr. Dornfest and I’m sure everyone wishes him all the best in his new job but it points out the exposure that users take on when they move either their data or the services they depend on to the cloud.
Protecting your data that you move to the cloud is straightforward as almost all cloud services allow you to back up that data somewhere, somehow. But what happens when the cloud service or company you’ve adopted goes away unexpectedly? Sure this case involves a one-man company offering free services but if you have trusted these services to run your business that’s little consolation. In this business climate even large companies can go away and therein lies the rub for those on the fence where moving to the cloud is concerned. What happens to your business if your cloud apps or services go away suddenly? How do you temper that exposure to protect your own interests?
I am currently considering moving from MS Money to an online money management service (e.g. mint) but THAT is exactly the reason why I am hesitant.
With Money I can keep using the software and data I have, if I want to, even if MS decides never to sell another version. And it is as simple as 1-2-3 to export the data and import it into another program (e.g. Quicken).
I find it shocking that services like Mint, don’t even tell you whether it is possible to export and back up your data before you register.
SiteCharts, that’s an excellent point, but as a long-time Mint user, I’m not sure the issue completely applies. At its core, Mint is a financial data aggregator, meaning that it gets all of the data from external sources, i.e.: your financial institutions. While you can modify that data in terms of how you categorize it on Mint, you could never “lose” the financial data as the source data is kept at your financial institutions. That’s different than documents in Google Docs, for example, where you’re creating data in the cloud that could go away forever.
I completely agree with your main point and since you can manipulate your Mint data through personalized categories, I do think it would be great if they offered an export feature. I just wanted to clarify that the potential loss of data is minimal in Mint’s case because you don’t create data with that service.
I’m not sure a credible business today would want to base it’s core operation around a free online service, and risk it’s day-to-day ability to function totally on a third party.
If you don’t have the capital and cash flow to buy what you need to operate your business, you probably shouldn’t be in business in the first place.
Just as with any offline software, you should have a backup strategy of your own in case anything goes wrong. This is probably doubly true with webapps as you are relying on the developer to maintain hardware as well as software. All of the cloud services we use offer very easy methods to get all of *your* data from them, and a wee bit of coding can ensure that this is regularly exported to another third-party incase of extreme failure.
We came across the very same decision-struggle when looking at online storage/sync/sharing options, and we narrowed down our choices to services that utilised Amazon’s S3 storage system because a) it’s unlikely Amazon will vanish overnight even if our interface provider does, and b) we have a whole world of interface options available to us in the future should we want to change/make our own interface etc.
Plus, with the system we eventually chose, the data is constantly sync’d/cached on every machine in our setup, so even if Amazon dissappear in a puff of smoke we still have our files (or, more likely, if we lose connectivity).
As with all these two-sided arguments, you can take a sensible middle ground allowing you the best of both worlds – as I found when my laptop HDD died on the road and a replacement drive, Kubuntu live CD and WiFi connection allowed me to be back working (with no data loss!) within hours of discovering the failure.
@Kevin.
Sorry for the delayed response but I just read it.
While what you are saying is true, Mint only acts as an aggregator for your financial data, my bank (BoA) doesn’t make the information available for download on its website after 12 (?) months. So if Mint goes away, you are in a world of pain trying to get year old statements from your bank.