- Chris Baraniuk
- technology reporter
2 hours ago
Credit, Natalie Brown
caption,
Natalie Brown suffered when her maternity blog suddenly disappeared
Natalie Brown has spent a decade struggling to grow her blog into a thriving business. Until one day he disappeared.
“I got sick. It just dawned on me…it just went away,” says Brown, a blogger who writes about motherhood and author of Confessions of a Crummy Mummy.
Their website was hosted by cloud service provider Gridhost, which shut down in November. Brown never received notice of the closure because his blog was created by a thirdparty company that went out of business.
Nor did she have access to the blog’s backup, since it was also hosted in the cloud by Gridhost. Stressful days followed. Many tears were shed.
Cloud computing, where information and software is stored in remote data centers and accessed over the internet, is becoming increasingly popular. For example, it enables small companies to set up email or data processing facilities without having to maintain their own IT infrastructure.
Credit, Getty Images
caption,
Cloud computing companies like AWS have experienced explosive growth in recent years
But when something goes wrong, the consequences can be devastating. Cloud services may be subject to intermittent outages or outages caused by technical glitches, cybersecurity attacks, or even lightning strikes.
In Brown’s case, the blog is a direct source of income. For example, companies that make maternity/parenting products pay her to link to her or post certain content on her blog.
“It literally puts food on our table,” she says.
Brown claims that tsoHost, the owner of Gridhost, did not give her access to the blog’s data and she was only able to recover it after enlisting the help of her former web developer.
“He said it took him about six hours to negotiate with them,” she recalls.
The blog is now live again on a different platform, and Brown has scheduled backups with a different provider.
A spokesman for tsoHost said the company was trying to reach customers before the Gridhost shutdown:
“We understand that the decision to retire the Gridhost platform will be disappointing, and tsoHost is working closely with customers to support the migrations.”
Credit, John Cairns
caption,
Businesses are becoming dependent on cloud computing providers, Vili Lehdonvirta warns
By definition, the use of cloud services makes a company dependent on third parties, says Vili Lehdonvirta, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK and author of the book Cloud Empires (“Empires of the Cloud”). ).
“What is the cloud? Well, the cloud is someone else’s computer,” he explains.
And cloud failures are not uncommon. Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest provider of cloud services, suffered a partial outage in December 2021, affecting thousands of customers.
Cloud services like Gridhost have also sometimes failed. Google will retire its cloud platform IoT Core in August. People use it to connect smart home devices, among other things.
Data from the Uptime Institute, a consulting organization, suggests that while the cloud isn’t becoming significantly less reliable overall, costly outages are becoming more common.
“More than 60% of defaults result in total losses of at least US$100,000 (about R$512,000), which is well above the 39% in 2019,” the institute says.
Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular among businesses, says Kristina McElheran of the University of Toronto in Canada. She and her colleagues regularly conduct largescale surveys of hundreds of thousands of companies across the United States.
Citing other studies, she also notes that the shift to remote working during the COVID19 pandemic has further accelerated cloud adoption.
“The cloud is a game changer for survival, growth and productivity for new (businesses), especially new and small (businesses),” said McElheran, looking at startups.
“But that’s where the tradeoff comes in — they lose control.”
Credit, Indigo Perez
caption,
Pokey Bolton has lost bookings for a major work event due to an outage at its cloud provider
One small business owner who knows this all too well is Pokey Bolton, an artist and promoter from Napa Valley, California. In early December 2022, its cloud email provider, Rackspace, was the target of a ransomware attack that affected thousands of customers.
“I’m angry,” she says.
This comes at a particularly sensitive time as Bolton traditionally gets a lot of bookings in early December for its annual craft workshops in January.
“It’s my big cash generator, it’s essential to my business,” he notes.
Hundreds of people usually sign up but having not been able to access her email for several days, she’s not sure how many entries may have been lost this year.
Bolton has switched email providers and says he has attempted to close his Rackspace account but has not yet received written confirmation of this. She also doesn’t know if the hackers accessed her email accounts, which contained some customer details and other sensitive information.
A Rackspace spokeswoman said the company was able to help more than threequarters of affected customers set up new email services on another platform.
“We are proactively reaching out individually to those who still need help,” she added.
Rackspace will post updates on the situation online.
However, it’s important to remember the many benefits of cloud computing, Lehdonvirta says, particularly in relation to uptime, a measure of how long a computer system runs without crashing.
“Despite these famous interruptions… [os provedores de nuvem] are able to deliver insane uptime that is very difficult to achieve in a smaller operation,” he explains.
Also, software running in the cloud can get the latest updates instantly, which should help keep you safe.
In general, cloud companies are able to offer very reliable services because they can spread data processing across multiple data centers, says Paul Watson, director of the National Data Innovation Center at Newcastle University in the UK.
“What you can do is detect the failure of one data center and use the resources in another,” he says.
Few small businesses or startups have this ability—if any.
Every once in a while, however, a company turns its back on the cloud. The chief technology officer of US software company 37signals recently announced that his company was exiting the cloud, partly because of cost reasons but also because of reliability concerns.
Better information about the risk of failure can help companies make more informed decisions, notes McElheran.
And as the cloud computing industry becomes less competitive and less reliable over time, policymakers may need to step in to enforce improvements.
But despite the recent disruptions, she adds:
“I don’t think we’re there yet.”