The Conversation has an interesting article, reflecting on cloud computing and its inherent risks. Starting point is the destruction of a large datacenter by a massive fire in France earlier this year and the impact the incident had and still has on the operations of the sites once hosted in this datacenter.
The article also asks if there is a real need to retain all of these massive amounts of data.
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head up! The article is in French.
Interesting indeedā¦ but I think the questions asked by the author are too narrow in focus. What was the state of information management prior to data centres and prior to computer databases? Corporations had to maintain paper records. Why are we collecting more data? Governments mandate ever increasing amounts of reporting and society and businesses need to be ever more efficient.
The author makes a few good points: Too few ask themselves often enough if information collected is relevant or when information becomes irrelevant; Too few make contingency plans in case disaster strikes; Legal incentives and business actions are too often poorly aligned; Common good is too often ignored.
Yesā¦ data centres consume a lot of resources. I posit they might consume less than if there was no data centreā¦ but that would require studying. In the meantime, we, as data professional, need to discuss data retention policy, disaster planning and the legal framework of solutions with our clients.
Hope this helps.
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I like that for once, someone writes about the reality: the cloud does not exist. The world of computing is full of empty buzz words like cloud and cloud computing ! Just new words for existing services. And people buy these new services as if they were the best invention. Cloud computing is great, you don't need to take care of your backups anymore . . . except when there is a fire in the datacenter.
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At the occasion I tested Safariās āTranslate websiteā feature. Works pretty well.
Cloud infrastructure provides many benefits. With the introduction of the M1 CPU there was lot of buzz around and in one podcast I listened to a long-term tech commentator discuss Apple's history with ARM processors. He was part of a team that provided advice to the Obama administration in 2012. One piece of the information was the projected energy requirements of computing resources in 2020. They forecast that the energy requirements would be 500% larger than what eventuated. He said the savings in energy was because (a) they didn't factor how cost/energy effective cloud computing would be and (b) a lot of the savings occurred because of intelligent use of ARM chips which are low power.
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