Keeping the Cloud worries in perspective

I just read on ebizQ that “the head of Air New Zealand is reported to have branded IBM “amateur” for its handling of a data center outage”. I think that one should consider such incidents in perspective.

Take the airline industry – flying is statistically much safer than other transportation such as automobiles, yet a flight accident gets worldwide attention while most car accidents go unnoticed (except for the victims). The same goes for hosting and Cloud operations, in many aspects – security, outages, performance – to take a few.

Frankly, the typical company’s data centre is significantly less secure and frequently poorly monitored, to a point that users often are not even aware they were hacked. So I would not lose sleep worrying about outages at IBM – much more likely about outages of my own data centre.