Alvaka's Blog

If you’ve been in the IT industry for awhile, you’ve no doubt noticed that it goes through one hype cycle after another.  Many of us witnessed the dot-com explosion, implosion and subsequent MSP market conversion. Watching the cloud hype cycle of the past few years is a little disturbing -- not because I lack excitement about the massive possibilities of distributed computing, utility billing, virtualization advancements and economies of scale; they are large parts of my company’s business model. What bothers me is the extent to which companies will go to make a claim about the cloud. The exaggerations and omissions -- stemming from either ignorance, lack of risk aversion or outright dishonesty -- being used to sell cloud computing and cloud storage services are just nauseating. As an officer of a company competing in this environment, it’s especially hard for me to ignore these problems with cloud storage.

As a computer systems network manager and member of the nonprofit High Tech Crime Consortium, Kevin McDonald has seen all manner of data disasters: the medical company whose patient treatment records were lost in a warehouse fire; the police department whose website host vanished overnight; even the careless employee whose leaky liter of Coke ruined a computer server. “If you are a small business and you have a catastrophic loss of data, more likely than not you will never recover,” says McDonald, executive vice president at Alvaka Networks in Irvine, Calif. “Data storage is so cheap now, if you can’t afford it you should shut your business down and do something else.”