Sony hack hits cloud computing

The Sony data breach that compromised the personal data of more than 100 million customers of the Japanese electronics conglomerate may claim yet another victim - the cloud computing industry, according to the Montreal Gazette.

Some businesses are rethinking plans to move to cloud-based computer systems located at remote data centres that can be accessed over the Web.

Shares of companies that specialise in cloud computing have been some of top-performing stocks over the past year.

But the attack on Sony, as well as a massive outage at Amazon's cloud computing centre, has caused some businesses to put the brakes on plans to move their operations into the cloud.

A cloud computing service is like an airliner - even though it can experience devastating crashes that affect many people, like Amazon's crash last month, it's still safer than driving your own car... or IT infrastructure, reports NetworkWorld.

That's the rationale provided by Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, during a panel discussion on cloud computing during a keynote address at Interop 2011.

Also on the panel were Randy Rowland, senior VP of product development at Terremark; Andy Schroepfer, VP of enterprise strategy at Rackspace; and moderator David Berlind, chief content officer at UBM TechWeb.

Berlind began the discussion by reviewing the recent cloud outages and attacks at Amazon - up to three days for some users - and the Sony PlayStation Network, which lasted several days, writes ComputerWorld.

He also quoted data that found that every one second of latency costs financial trading firms $100 million over a year.

“Is this mission critical?” Berlind asked of the cloud infrastructure in light of these outages. “This is a confidence issue.”

“It's like an airline crash,” responded Citrix's Crosby, “but it's still safer in an airplane than driving to work”.