Companies like Salesforce.com and VMware have risen to prominence because of the shift to Internet-based, or cloud, computing. And even stodgy old tech giants like Dell and Microsoft have been trying to refashion themselves as cloud computing companies.
But high-profile outages have raised concerns about the reliability and security of cloud computing.
On Monday, Amazon.com’s EC2 web-hosting service went down, taking Twitter, Netflix, Reddit and other services with it for a short period, according to TechCrunch. This follows a much worse outage in April, when the Amazon service was offline for hours – in some cases, days – and data was lost, according to Business Insider and the Register.
In March, Google’s Gmail service failed for thousands of users for several days, according to the Los Angeles Times and the Register. And in May, Google’s Blogger service was unavailable for an extended period, All Things D reported.
In addition to service failures, online networks have been victimized by hackers. Sony’s PlayStation Network, Citigroup and government agencies and others have suffered severe cyberattacks this year, according to the Huffington Post.
These sorts of incidents are upsetting to people who are storing more of their data and even business applications in the cloud.
Photo: Scene from "The Simpsons."
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