Lightning May Be Hazardous to Your Cloud

Typically data centers are in places where the land and facilities are cheaper than say in a windowless building in downtown metropolis. You'll find yottabytes data centers twiddling away in remote places like Fargo ND (Microsoft), The Dalles OR (Google), Allen TX (Cisco), and internationally in locations such as Ireland, China, India, or Japan. Remember virtualization? Well, it's more or less the same to marketers as cloud computing. Regardless of what you call your online data storage method or how your firm accesses it, that data still resides on a physical machine plugged into an electrical grid.

A lot of data bits we use in our daily lives are making their way to the cloud. Name any online service (Flickr, Google Docs, Amazon AWS, Office Live, Adobe AIR) and some or all of its data is hosted virtually. Businessweek notes these two primary risks of using cloud computing: 

• Risk #1 - your data could be exposed to third parties
• Risk #2 - data and apps may only be available when you are connected to the Internet AND when that service is up and running

A simple act of nature can blow up backup generators, disrupt electricity, and take entire systems offline and require manual operations (actual human technicians) to bring those systems back online.

With that in mind, is your business ready for the cloud?