Krishwords

I don’t talk politics in this blog (and have other outlets to vent my feelings) but I can’t help in this case. Conservatives pull back any attempts to push the envelope while dealing with social issues by inculcating fear in the minds of people. That is what is happening with regards to cloud computing too. Those companies whose business interests are threatened by cloud computing and those in media who are wedded to these companies and their technology, are unleashing a wave of fear about cloud computing. The traditionalists in the software world take an upcoming promising technology that is still in its infancy and use fear tactics to seed confusion in the minds of users. We saw a security meme in the blogosphere that cast a huge shadow of vulnerability on the very concept of cloud computing. Then, with the release of Kaminsky’s DNS exploit in the wild, people are talking about how it exposes the inherent security risks in the cloud computing world. If you are someone who is bitten by this fear bug, I want to point out that all these vulnerabilities they point out (and even more) exist in the current world of online services and traditional software too. We saw similar wave of fear when email was gaining traction. The threats of spam and phishing still exists but we are not going back to using snail mail. The scenario is similar in the case of cloud computing. There are threats to cloud computing and I am not denying it. But if you do the risk benefit analysis, the advantage of cloud computing outweighs the threat factor. Also, the scenario is similar to what happened when we changed from person to person direct talking to telephonic conversations. It is same as what happened when we changed from snail mail to email. The threats shouldn’t force us to shut down cloud computing. If we do it, then the threat wins. Instead, we should take on the threats to cloud computing head on and try to minimize the impact. We should focus on developing better cloud technologies that eliminate these threats. More than anything else, we should realize that all these security threats (pointed out in the cloud security meme and talk about how Kaminsky exploit can affect cloud computing) exists in the case of traditional software services and in the current day data center based traditional web hosting approaches. Let us look forward than look backwards due to the wave of fear unleashed by traditionalists.