Sony had to surrender to a hacking attack late last week and shut down its Playstation Network (PSN). It is still down. Is it time to be concerned and do you really care?
If you enjoy the Playstation community and playing online, the (temporary) closure of the PSN is an annoyance. We have seen people asking for compensation, which is somewhat silly, since most of us don’t pay for the service anyway. However, what if this was not the PSN, but something more important – a cloud computing service a few years from now? A service that is essential to your privacy and to your communication ability? A service that is as essential as your phone or electricity? Would you – wait … – could you accept a shutdown for several days?
We believe that the indefinite shutdown of the PSN has implications that reach far beyond the simple unavailability of a gaming service. Amazon’s cloud service was recently offline as well. The PSN is, essentially a public cloud service. What we learned is that these services are just as vulnerable as your PC at home. However, while Sony and Amazon can afford to invest much more in their security, the rewards of hacking these services is huge. It is the hacking equivalent of discovering a Spanish galleon carrying a secret treasure.
If you considered using services such as Google Docs or Office 365 as a replacement of your local office suite, you may think about the idea again. Is that such a great idea? What if you can’t use your office software for several days or an entire week? What if critical documents are not accessible? What if they are lost? Sure, you should always have local copies of such documents, but that’s not the point of cloud computing and surely not the usage model of devices like Google’s Chrome OS notebook Cr-48.
Of course you should care about this network shutdown and it is good idea to closely watch what is going on over at Amazon and Sony. There are lessons to be learned that may impact the way we perceive this next computing stage initially. The industry will have to provide answers as a whole – claims that cloud computing networks are more secure than your home PC aren’t good enough anymore. There needs to be guarantees that your data is safe and that there are alternate ways to access your services at any given time.
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