I've been reading all the news about the sidekick and it's lost data and how it's somehow "The Clouds Fault" Such nonsense. Reading through the article posted here by the folks at The Motley Fool points to more "Cloud FUD". Or is it the users fault? Blindly trusting their data to a dark and murky "Cloud"? Or is it the fault of the owner of the server that crashed? It depends. But it's NOT "The Clouds" fault. This vague notion that things we don't understand must be "in the cloud" is rampant these days. Yet, at the end of the day, it is really "A Utility" and needs to be thought of as such. The biggest difference between your power or water as a utility is that with "The Cloud" you have many providers to choose from depending on the type of "Power" or "Water" you need and the level of service you require.
Utility providers are fallible. How many times have you lost a power transformer in your neighborhood? Or a water main line burst somewhere in the city?
Cloud Computing/Utility Computing - It is up to the owner of the server to make the service they provide to their customer as Highly Available as possible or at least to the level of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) they present to their customers. It's not some magical "Cloud" floating somewhere beyond physical reach. It is physical servers and storage and switches and routers owned and operated my your third party of choice depending on the application you wish to use.
Don't blindly put your faith in any one provider without fully understanding your risks. It's NOT "The Clouds Fault". It is a persons fault for not designing and implementing a highly available architecture that included data replication and backup services with full recovery scenarios documented and properly tested.
How often do you test YOUR System and Data recovery process?
-Todd