Amazon and PSN outages won't halt cloud revolution

"Imagine setting up shop on a platform perpetually prone to security vulnerabilities."

Of course, you are referring to Windows with that statement.

As a hard-core GNU/Linux user and advocate, one may think that I would be inclined to agree with you.

And while it is true that Microsoft gets a lot of bad press (of which a given amount is certainly deserved), other platforms (including those running AIX, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc.) can be just as vulnerable to attack as Windows if not managed correctly.

Conversely, I have seen instances of Windows that, due to thoughtful application of security policy and deactivation of unnecessary services, were extremely difficult to exploit, and once actually exploited, properly contained and minimised the damage.

No operating system or platform is bullet-proof, and all operating systems are "perpetually prone" to security vulnerabilities of one kind or another.

Totally disagree with Matt

Stupid people are equally at risk whatever system they use, but people with just a modicum of common sense are far safer maintaining their own system which they have full control over, as opposed to farming the lot out to an organisation that have absolutely no control over at all.

Seriously?

"Frankly, most of us are more routinely incompetent than Amazon, so that those "good old days" were fraught with even more risk of downtime and security breaches."

Really??? I know I take care of systems. It's called 'due diligence', using the right tools for the right tasks, introducing a mix of vendors (where possible) to mitigate the risk of one being compromised, and not being a div for not changing default settings (I'm alluding to the recent Reg article where a vendor was blamed for a hack, when it was the idiot who put it in who was to blame).

I don't care what the pre-sales goons say, I still don't know what security measures are in place. But cloud computing or not, too many people seem to want to move there eggs from one basket to another - I appreciate it's the work, often, of CTOs and CEOs, but cripes, perspective here. What happened to reasoned DR/BCP? "Oh, it's the cloud, how ever could it go wrong?"

Control, something oft underrated!

How about some real journo work?

Oh come on Matt - how can you compare Cloud with Windows? That's the kind of nonsense my Mac using luddite friends come up with, y'know, the ones who think Sky Broadband comes over the satellite link!

All "Cloud" is, is moving the central server services and/or infrastructure to an outsource provider. It's the same as having IBM running DVLA in Swansea since 2001, but in this modern era has a much snazzier name. It has nothing to do with Windows as most people think of it (desktop). Fair enough, you might've had a raft of Windows Servers for your filesystem, but the heavy grunt work would've been on UNIX servers unless your IT mob were incompetent. In all fairness, this brave new world of Cloud will be exactly the same, with *NIX Cloud servers being accessed by Windows desktops on the client side... The big impact is that these last two high-profile failures has reminded people that Cloud providers need to be open with communications so failover strategies can be put into place. If you lost core services in your internally managed systems, you CTO/CIO will be bollocking the geekeratti until the problem is solved, on Cloud you lose that control which will should be a warning for companies to think hard about putting critical services in the Cloud.

Please stop with the knee jerk sound byte reactions - we're not stupid Merkins.

When I was very young...

The fad was on how interpreted languages and mainframes were bulky and slow and should be buried as deep as possible.

Nowadays, the fad is on Java-for-everything and cloud computing.

We *really* need a facepalm icon...