Megaupload Equals Mega Fail for Cloud Computing

The by the U.S. government is not being perceived for what it is: a mega failure for .

The operation, which had 50 million users, was a lot more than a pirate operation. It provided legitimate cloud-based backup, storage, and transfer functionality for plenty of people.

So now, two storage companies that hosted users' data . I'm certain many, if not most, of the 50 million users will find out about this on Friday, when some automated function fails. When these poor saps look into the failure, they'll be surprised to learn that their data has been unceremoniously deleted. If it was important, well then, too bad.

I can hear the howling now as they call their lawyers. And make no mistake, just because you and I know about this Megaupload take down, it does not mean all users do. Megaupload would have to make 50 million phone calls to inform customers, and even that would be futile.

As for alerting people by email, it would a miracle if Megaupload could reach 50 percent of the affected people. Messages would either get lost in the spam filter, be screened by some approval system that expects a human response, be buried by normal mail, or simply be ignored by the user. When you see a message in your inbox with the subject: IMPORTANT NOTICE in all caps, the first thing you likely think is, "Oh, dear God, what are they trying to sell me now?"

To be honest, I have seen no indication that the company or anyone else has gone through the expense of notifying anyone. I even assume that many customers do not even know they are customers of Megaupload.

I wonder how many priceless family digital photos are going to end up as lost forever—the picture of grandma holding her newborn grandson for the first time; the joyful photos from Bill's wedding highlighting true love months before he was lost in Iraq; and other heartbreaking moments. Gone. What about the notarized scans of important contracts? Sites like Megaupload had a lot of uses.

This fiasco will become the biggest fail in the history of cloud computing to date.

To me, and , using a site in the cloud for backup is folly unless it just happens to be a third method of reinforcement. You have your primary data intact. You have a backup of it and a second backup on premises—some sort of recovery backup that can replace the whole computer. Then, you have an off-site backup in case, as you rightly worried, your entire office burns to the ground, taking the computers and all the backups down in flames with it.

That's fine. The cloud does work for that. When these folks go to perform their routine upload of new data to the off-site and it turns out to be Megaupload, they'll hopefully find out that something is wrong and adjust their strategy.

I've never had a problem with this, but it's not really cloud computing either. I know a lot of people, however, who have long since concluded that it is a great idea to keep everything in the cloud. Somewhere they heard it was a good idea. Ha. Wrong!