Public cloud computing is in the news in a bad way, with Dropbox’s latest security breach and The Woz’s new fears about giving up local control of one’s data.
The Woz seemed to be thinking more out loud than making a prediction; he’s allowed to say whatever he wants in any case. As a Founding Father of the personal-computing revolution, he’s no doubt horrified at the idea of handing over one’s personal stuff to some faceless corporation who promises to store said stuff somewhere, somehow. What if they lose it?
I don’t know whether Woz is also worried about government snooping of all this stuff. I know I certainly am, and I am thoroughly disheartened to see the Obama Administration continue to act as if 1984 has finally, and truly, arrived in this great nation of ours.
Meanwhile, Dropbox seems to be the latest public-cloud company to be victimized by its customers. People with bad intentions allegedly stole passwords from somewhere in cyberspace, and found that some of them also worked at Dropbox. The company has promised tighter security, including required two-stage authentication.
Really, it’s like leaving your laptop in your unlocked car or apartment. But Dropbox has hardly been pro-active in heading these problems off at the pass. eCommerce sites with similarly flimsy security at least have the good stuff – credit card info – encrypted or outsourced and doubly encrypted.
With Dropxbox, the good stuff is rather larger in size than credit-card info, and my clear 20/20 hindsight says the company should have been more serious about securing it, dumb customers or no.
I don’t think these headlines are going to impede public cloud adoption by large enterprises. Any enterprise IT department that wishes, or has been directed to wish, for public cloud in its strategy will have a detailed checklist to head off amateur-hour mistakes.
I also don’t think these headlines will impede the growth of Apple’s iCloud. Myrmidons will continue to follow their departed leader’s vision for several more years, it seems.
I do think these headlines represent a grave threat to all who sell public-cloud ideas to small and medium-sized businesses. Public cloud security lapses look like the inevitable result of hare-brained scchemes to these folks. Since a super-majority of them run their companies on Windows, it seems that Microsoft has a large opportunity here to jump in more aggressively with cloud, integrate ironclad security with Windows 8, and save the day.
The hard reality that our modern era of viruses and malware was largely spawned by Microsoft’s sloppiness in integrating Internet Explorer as an ostensibly key part of Windows gives me little faith this will happen.