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Is Space Weather a Threat to Cloud Computing?

It is no big secret that I am a huge believer in cloud computing, so much so that I think enterprise-owned or -managed datacenters or infrastructures will be the exception in the next 10 years, with enterprise datacenters existing only for very specific use cases.

From a technical and cost perspective, cloud computing is a great model. But one of the things I failed to factor into my relentless excitement about cloud computing is the fact that now that we have taken computing into the clouds, we have little to no control over natural disasters and our ability to recover from them.
Now, I'm not talking about earthly natural disasters, those we can somewhat protect against by building redundancy, geo-replication etc. Instead, I'm talking about the unearthly ones, such as space weather that could disrupt and destroy, like solar flares.

At a recent customer meeting while I was raging on the benefits of cloud computing and preaching like the good apostle that I am. One executive caught me off-guard and asked me about solar flares and how that could pose a potential risk to cloud computing. Here I am talking for the last 35 minutes about the cloud unchallenged, so how dare he throw out that question! My mind was working at 1000 MPH and I did not really have a good answer. My response basically was, we have bigger things to worry about with a solar flare that's powerful enough to knock out your cloud data.

In any event, I was not satisfied with my answer and he honestly got me thinking, not only had this guy stumped me, but he also made me doubt my cloud faith. So, I began researching and to my surprise I had answered his question pretty accurately. A sigh of relief rushed through my entire body -- "Relax, Eli, you are still 'the kind'!" -- and my ego was restored.

On a more serious note, I found out later that this executive had read a CNN report on the top 4 things that could bring down the Internet and he correlated the Internet to also mean cloud computing. It's a valid point, and the truth is that we have experienced solar flares in the past and they have disrupted our communications systems and the Internet. That being said, the kind of solar flare that could bring down cloud computing and the Internet as a whole would have to be so powerful that it will essentially fry all electronics on earth.

Riddle me this: In the event a solar flare with such power strikes, do you believe that your private on- or off-premise datacenter will survive it? With a solar flare of such power, do you really think that your backup tapes will be of any value? And lastly, do you think you will be thinking about your job, your data and your clouds?

I have maintained for years that the Earth is a single point of failure, so while our extravagant disaster recovery plans can protect us against earthly disasters, at some point you just have to throw in the towel and say this is the best we can do.

With my faith in cloud computing restored, I am now researching other risks to cloud computing that are a little less "doomsday" and a lot more practical and I must admit I am finding challenges I never thought of. I'd like to start a conversation about the potential risks to cloud computing, so please share your insights and thoughts but please steer clear of the obvious.


Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/23/2012 at 1:39 PM


What is this?

Reader Comments:

Tue, Jul 24, 2012 Elias Khnaser Chicago, IL

@Tom, good points all around. The only thing i was saying is that communications links are critical BUT we rely on them today anyway. Our datacenters are in co-locations like Savvis, Equinix and others, what is the diference if we are establishing direct connections to these co-los or to the cloud? granted with the cloud we may have a different types of links and more of them but that could also serve to balnce traffic and nothing stops us from having th same direct linkwe have today to the cloud and use alternatives as backup....what i am saying is it is not a show stopper we are already relying on these links. Eli

Tue, Jul 24, 2012 Tom Pittsburgh

As to your article, don't forget shielding. Electrical shielding goes a long way to stop EMF, be it solar flares or man-made - the latter of which is far more likely to cause issues. Electrical shielding + redundancy makes extrater-restrial weather as harmful as the terrestrial sort and it is far less common to begin with.

Tue, Jul 24, 2012 Tom Pittsburgh

Elias, while I agree with you in general, Old Guy does have the point that Networking is the real bottleneck to any cloud deployment. Gigabit, and even 10G connections will be a chokehold as more data moves to the cloud and cloud computing is ramped up. But this is no more an issue than a local power outage with similar redundancy options available. Co-location services & replication replace generators and load balancers replace automatic transfer switches (I used to be a maintenance electrician in a former career). Assuming we throw enough of the right hardware and software at the problem, of course Cloud *can* be a cheaper option. It is knowing the right options and configuring it to take advantage of them.

Mon, Jul 23, 2012 Elias Khnaser Chicago, IL

@old guy, you are getting old buddy :) but you also did not read my column very accurately, id id mention that there are specific use cases where private datacenters will remain and those include hospitals, but with all due respect, today, most enterprises, i said most not all, already use co-location services, they are already relying on commmunications links between their sites and a co-located datacenter so the notion that going to a public cloud si rsiky is, well to put in your words, naive :) as far as sescurity and privacy, there is a lot going on and a lot more to come as far as data privacy and security that we will tackle in the next 10 years. As more and more workloads become virtualized you will find that sustaining the cost of building, owning and operating infrastructure is too much to bare. Hospitals already outsource a lot of their systems to the cloud, take email for instance, but yes they will not put Epic in the cloud, hospitals are an interesting use case but the majority of workloads will find their way into the public cloud with exceptions. Remember this: We will be justifying workloads in the private cloud or private datacenter just like we justify physical servers today. Stick around and we will pick up this oncevrsation yearly to see where we are at and maybe you will owe me a beer then? or maybe i will :) Eli

Mon, Jul 23, 2012 Old Guy Richmond, VA

I think you are naive if you think managed data centers will go the way of the dodo. The number 1 down time related issue is related to WAN connectivity. We can spin up generators and keep our sites running with or without WAN link. Consider hospitals and plant production environments that can not afford this level of downtime. This does not touch on security and privacy. There was an excellent VM presentation I saw a while back with 1 slide that addressed this topie well. One axis was labeled "Whos data is it", and the other axis, "Who needs access". When it is your data and you need access to it - private clound. When it is public data and the public needs access - public cloud. Any combination thereof results in a hybrid cloud. This does not touch on the legal ramifications. Public clounds are just another tool in the tool box. They are not the end all be all.

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