Unless you ’ve been vacationing off the gridiron at a cabin in the Rockies for the past calendar week , you are probably mindful that the popular T - Mobile Sidekick appear to have miss the striking , calendar , and other sync information of its 1 million exploiter .

It ’s also heavy to miss the phone number of articles and media sources that link the Sidekick failure with a failure of swarm computing in ecumenical . To be fair , not everything that is on the cyberspace is necessarily cloud computer science , and not every cloud computing bankruptcy is indicative of a unsuccessful person in swarm computing in world-wide .

The Sidekick from T - Mobile was one of the first instance of a fluid gimmick provide on-line backup of data . Ostensibly , the fact that photos , message , striking , and calendar entries were synchronise with servers on the cyberspace provided user with a safety internet in the event that their Sidekick twist was lost or stolen . Simply get a new gimmick and synchronise it up with the online data backup . Voila !

Apparently someone forgot to consider what happens if it ’s the server that misplace the data rather than the Sidekick . A serious server crash at Danger , the provider of the Sidekick data syncing infrastructure , has forced G of Sidekick owner to answer that inquiry the punishing room . The response is : the data is gone .

The loss of data is a Brobdingnagian embarrassment for T - Mobile and forMicrosoft , which purchase Danger . The high - visibility loser damages the believability of both companies as it relate to bring home the bacon static and secure mobile religious service and data point protection . However , the unsuccessful person does not mean that the swarm ca n’t be trusted .

Server crashes take place . irregular outage due to waiter crash are tolerable . information should never be lost though . It is basic net admin 101 to backup data . meshwork administrators should know that regular backups must be performed and that the integrity and accessibility of the backed up data must be periodically verify to ensure it can be reestablish when necessary .

There is no alibi for Danger to have been host data for 1 million users without having true data musical accompaniment in place . I am proceed to give Microsoft the benefit of the question and seize that Danger was still manoeuvre more or less severally since the acquisition . I think Microsoft had not yet amply assimilated Danger and most likely assumed that Danger was capable of rudimentary waiter direction tasks like backing up information .

The passing of Sidekick data is a loser by Danger to execute common sentience server maintenance practices . By extension , the bankruptcy is also a failure of Microsoft to impose speech sound electronic connection management policies were being pursue , and of T - Mobile to ensure the vendors it partner with are capable of leave true service . It is not , however , a failure of the cloud .

When Google News or Gmail experience outages the medium ( myself let in ) cries that the swarm has failed . When Danger loses Sidekick datum sync online from 1 million users , the medium declares it another failure of the swarm .

But Google is not the cloud . Claiming that a failure by Google is a failure of cloud calculation in general is like claiming that New Coke was a failure of all flabby drinks . Declaring the loss of Sidekick data a failure of the cloud is like claiming that the loser of the Yugo was a failure of automobiles in general .

The problem for the cloud and the hereafter of cloud computing is that perception is world . Google is virtually synonymous with the entanglement , and to many fair users , the Web and the cloud are synonymous . When a Web - base juggernaut like Google experience an outage or a technology giant like Microsoft loses Sidekick data , it damages the believability of the swarm . It does n’t weigh if that rap is precise or not , it just is and the winner of swarm computing depends on educating users to understand what the cloud is , what the swarm is n’t , and how to choose a reliable cloud vendor .

It can be argued that many of the armed service outage and issues dubbed cloud failures by the media are not even really cloud computation . However , even for those that are the reality is that seller fail , not the cloud . It is important when trusting datum and program to the swarm that you do your due industry and pick out a marketer with a stable , honest , and springy web … and one that perform datum backups on a regular basis as well .

[ Tony Bradley is an info certificate and unified communicating expert with more than a ten of enterprise IT receive . He tweets as@PCSecurityNewsand provides tips , advice and reviews on data security and merged communications technologies onhis website . ]