It’s all about trust, baby

Imagine losing all your contacts, emails and calendars – you know you have a meeting with an important client next week but you can’t remember which day and you can’t ask the customer because their contact details are gone.

That’s been the fate of a million Sidekick mobile phone owners in the United States over the last two weeks when the servers storing the Sidekick data went down.

The Sidekick is an unusual mobile phone that saves all its data “on the cloud”, a big group of servers run by the device’s designer, Danger, who were bought out by Microsoft in early 2008. Unlike other phones and PDAs, the Sidekick doesn’t synch with your own computer and stored data may get wiped if it can’t find the cloud servers.

Which is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when the Sidekick cloud stopped. Owners of the Sidekick, a phone that’s never been sold in Australia, have been through a harrowing fortnight hoping their data will be recovered which Microsoft now believes can be done.

Sidekick’s outage is a major embarrassment for Microsoft, who are pitching their Azure cloud product as alternative to other cloud services provided by competitors like Amazon and Google, and the failure certainly deserves to be one of the great technology disasters of the decade.

The question now is how badly this outage will affect cloud and software as a service provider. These services rely on customers trusting data and critical business applications to a third party and the Sidekick saga doesn’t inspire confidence.

It would be a shame if this is the case, as cloud services offer a lot of advantages to smaller businesses. In many ways they offer the same advantages big business have had through outsourcing services at a fraction of the price and complexity.

We need to remember that all technology breaks. People press the wrong buttons, unexpected software bugs appear and sometimes things just break or go wrong. Every business needs a contingency plan if things stop working.

While a data backup regime is a critical part of a contingency plan, you still need to consider other aspects such what happens if the power grid fails and leaves you without electricity for three days, if bushfires or floods stop workers getting to the office, or what will happen if you forget to pay your phone bill and suddenly you have no internet access for a week.

Technology is complex and we trust that it is always reliable, but sometimes it’s just not as trustworthy as we’d like.

So have fall back systems just in case your trust in technology is misplaced and test it regularly.

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Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3000 subscribers.