What does that cloud look like to you?

So, the Internet has been full of people from all sides talking about what I’m beginning to think of as the most ironic IT failure ever. I mean really, would you trust your data to a company called “Danger”?

For those not paying attention, last week someone attempted to do some work on the servers that hold the data of every T-Mobile Sidekick customer. That person or persons really dropped the ball, and all that data is gone, possibly for good. This is clearly a pretty big deal. Lots of questions are being asked, one of the more amusing ones being, “Who is really responsible? T-Mobile or Danger / Microsoft?”. That should be entertaining to watch shake out. A lot of people are also arguing over whether or not calling this a “Cloud failure”, as in “Cloud Computing” as in “The Cloud” that everyone is supposed to be buying into, is fair or not.

The opponents to this view are saying that the infrastructure in question was not a cloud infrastructure, so this is not a cloud failure, but simply a very visible normal IT failure. And technically, they’re right. But guess what? That doesn’t matter. This feels like a cloud failure. The service is the model of a cloud application. I have my device “here”, but all my data, all the stuff I really care about is “out there”. Where supposedly it is getting taken good care of. Not the case this time.

I really feel for the people who are investing a lot of time and effort into getting cloud computing into the mainstream. Seeing this labeled a cloud failure must be infuriating. Because it’s not. But very few people, especially tech news people looking for headlines, are going to care about that. The Sidekick model is undeniably a “cloud” model, even if it’s got normal IT guts. Maybe that is why this is a cloud failure. It’s not a failure of a cloud computing infrastructure, but a design failure where a cloud application was run on a non-cloud infrastructure?

In any case, the whole cloud concept just got a big black eye, deserved or not, and it’s going to take a lot of work to shake it off. Particularly in the minds of the people who matter most, the non-techies who ultimately pay the bills.