Is the Cloud Safe?

by Thomas on 26. Apr, 2011 in Thomas Voyces Blog

“The main question to answer”, said Bernie, “is will their stock go up faster than our stock, fair valuations assumed.” My business partner and I were considering an offer for our company back in 2000. Bernard’s ability to boil the complex down to a simple set of rules remains the most unique and valuable tool in his box. His background as a probability teacher at MIT serves him well, far outside the realm of signal processing. His analysis was dead on, and we decided that we like the bet on our our stock, and we walked from the deal.

Last week’s Amazon’s EC2 outage is being used by some as a call to question our move to the cloud. I understand the issue in a personal way; one service that I am running was down for hours as Heroku struggled to get their service back online. So, is the “cloud” ready for primetime? It does seem like yesterday was a bit of evidence that it’s not.

However, I think there’s a different analysis that suggests that nearly all companies should strongly consider a move to the cloud, even as effects of yesterday’s crash are still being felt. The main question to answer is not “Is the cloud secure and stable?”, but “Is the cloud more secure and stable than what I’m able to provide?” In short, and to be specific about it, do you feel like your resources and technical staff can at least equal those of Amazon’s? If you are Verizon, then maybe so. If you are a small startup… obviously not. The safe bet is that Amazon’s infrastructure and staff are way more sophisticated than you could possibly afford. The fact that Amazon experienced an outage simply means that their substantial investments were not enough to maintain service levels; it does not mean that you could have done any better. It’s like the old joke about the two explorers in the jungle who meet up with a tiger. One screams “Hey, we gotta run! Why are you sitting down to tie your shoes?! We gotta outrun that tiger!” “No,” said the other explorer. “I don’t have to outrun that tiger, I just have to outrun you!”

This is a principle that we can extend to any part of the cloud question. Can a third party do a better job than I can? If so, it’s perfectly rational to outsource it, even when the outsourcer isn’t perfect.