Is Google Losing Document?

“Cash for Clunkers” Should Have Used the Cloud!

By G C Network | August 24, 2009

Rich Bruklis wrote an excellent essy on how the government missed a perfect opportunity to use cloud computing. In “Cloud Opportunity Missed” he writes: “It appears that the voucher system…

US Navy Experiments With Secure Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 20, 2009

This week in San Diego, CA the US Navy held the initial planning conference for Trident Warrior ’10. The Trident Warrior series is the premier annual FORCEnet Sea Trial Event…

GSA To Present On Cloud Initiative at NCOIC Plenary

By G C Network | August 13, 2009

A General Services Administration (GSA) representative is now scheduled to provide a briefing on the agency’s cloud computing initiative during a “Best Practices for Cloud Initiatives using Storefronts” session on…

FAA CIO Focuses on Cybersecurity

By G C Network | August 12, 2009

During this week Federal Executive Forum, FAA CIO Dave Bowen mentioned protection against software vulnerabilities, wireless intrusion and website vulnerabilities as his top cybersecurity priorities. As the Assistant Administrator for…

DHS Asst. Secretary Addresses Cybersecurity Priorities

By G C Network | August 11, 2009

Greg Schaffer, Assistant Secretary for CyberSecurity & Communications for the US Department of Homeland Security, sees Trusted Internet Connections, EINSTEIN, and front line defense of the nation’s networks as top…

US DoD Chief Security Officer on Cybersecurity Priorities

By G C Network | August 10, 2009

In a Federal Executive Forum interview, Robert Lentz, Chief Security Officer for the US Department of Defense, highlighted the departments cybersecurity priorities. Mr. Lentz is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of…

Twitter Under Denial of Service Attack

By G C Network | August 6, 2009

Multiple sources are reporting that Twitter continues to be under a denial of service attack. Some are speculating that this represents the power of a coordinated bot network attack. For…

NCOIC Holding Full Day Cloud Computing Session

By G C Network | August 5, 2009

The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) will be holding a one-day cloud computing session during its plenary meetings, 21-25 September at the Fair Lakes Hyatt in Fairfax, VA. A…

Sevatec a New Player in the Federal Cloud Computing Market

By G C Network | August 3, 2009

Just in time for the new Federal Cloud Computing Storefront, Sevatec, Inc. is announcing the development of a toolkit to help federal agencies transform their enterprise architectures to cloud computing…

GSA Releases Cloud Computing RFQ

By G C Network | July 31, 2009

Following through on a much anticipated action, GSA released their Cloud Computing Request For Quotation (RFQ) today. Cloud computing is a major part of President Obama’s reform effort and this…

John Dvorak posted this question on his blog Saturday and as of Sunday evening had 52 responses! This is not a good thing for building confidence in cloud computing. Or is it?

The story is that users of Google Docs were receiving the message “Sorry! We are experiencing technical difficulties and cannot show all of your documents.” Apparently the document were restored by Saturday evening, but this incident just reinforces two points:

  • Just like any other human enterprise, cloud computing isn’t infallible; and
  • The Google cloud was apparently able to restore all the documents

In the thread it seems that Google Docs was down for one day. Not knowing what happened, this recovery seems to have been just as good as any other global enterprise.

So what’s the beef with cloud computing? I don’t see any. I do, however, see a problem with the document recovery delay. The issue is that a cloud service should be designed in a way that makes such failures invisible to the users.

This is why I’m a fan of cryptographic data splitting and with geographic disbursement. With this approach, even with a complete failure in one geographic location, data can be reconstituted and served immediately from the other, multiple storage locations without service lost. This type of service level cannot be provided by current RAID solutions.

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network

1 Comments

  1. maplestorymesos on April 5, 2012 at 6:02 pm

    Your idea coincides with mine.and I think it's better.
    ————————————————————————————————————
    Nike Free Run