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• Posted Aug. 20, 2012, 2:31 p.m. - 11 years, 8 months ago

The Cloud Alone Is Not Always Good

I just flew out to our nation’s capital to repair some equipment at that proverbial undisclosed location.  I had a case of hard drives and a combination of a dozen DVDs and CDs for software re-installs, if needed.

With a policy of in and no out, the hard drives and other media would be scanned and examined by the best techs and software that exists to make sure no nasty programs were brought inside.  Once inside, nothing could be brought out to make sure secrets were kept inside that undisclosed location.

I started a triage to figure out what could be fixed while waiting a day for my hard drives and DVDs to be scanned, blessed as A-OK and returned to me.  They arrived by the following morning.

Several software re-installs, RAID arrays were replaced, and other things were done that I can’t even hint at.  All was going smooth and I would be ready to hop on an airplane for my return to California.

I had a final system upgrade to do.  I needed a file that had been updated especially for this location.  The firmware people had just uploaded the file into a very secure section of the cloud for me to pull down when needed.

Since no public Internet access was allowed at this facility, I went back to the hotel, downloaded the update, burned it to a disk, and returned to wait to the next day when the update scan would be complete.

The cloud is a really nice and convenient storage place and sections of it are even approved to be used for government work in most secure environments.  Unfortunately, when you do not have access to the cloud, you can be delayed or even prevented from accomplishing your work.

I was lucky this time, as it only cost a couple of thousand dollars for another day hotel stay and a new airplane ticket.

Even though this could not have been helped (the update was not available when I left) I was still frustrated.  So, I share these words of wisdom with you:

Always have a backup plan for retrieving business data from the cloud.  There may be a day where there are no clouds available.

Many companies have wireless access points for guests to use to connect to the Internet.  All it takes is a WAP to go down, and your business presentation or demo from the cloud is toast.

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