Nearly Avoiding Total Disaster
Most of us were probably blissfully unaware that we came perilously close to disaster on Tuesday morning. At 4:30 am EST while many of us were still asleep, Google’s Gmail was shut down for two and a half hours. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the outage was caused by the installation of new software, which triggered a bug in the Gmail code. The outage was near disaster for users and companies that needed access to their e-mail on Google’s servers. It also highlights the fact that centralization of formerly-desktop functions is fraught with perils.
Photo by manfrys (licensed under CC)
The companies that provide these services—such as Google and Salesforce—believe that they are providing something that companies would be unable to provide themselves, and scholars—such as Professor Randal C. Picker of Chicago Law School—believe that the shift to cloud computing (think Gmail, where the computer functions are centralized, as opposed to performed at your own computer) is natural because users are bad at performing their own tech support, computers are complicated, poorly run computers are used by hackers to harm everyone else, and users cannot buy additional computing power as it is needed.
This, however, ignores two looming threats. The first, which is highlighted by Google’s outage, is that when these services go down, it no longer just affects one company, it affects all companies, and there is no way that those companies can adequately secure themselves. One might argue that this is no different than when a utility company, like the electric company, loses service. However, companies that are concerned about losing electricity have backup generators; companies that are concerned about the phone lines have satellite phones. When you use Google for your e-mail and documents, there is no backup. If you are working on a document in Google Docs, you can’t also have a copy stored on your desktop. You could have an older version, but for companies that are making sales every day and tracking them in a Google Docs spreadsheet that isn’t a viable alternative.
The second threat posed by such centralization comes from malicious attacks. Obviously, there has always been a concern about computer viruses; and computer worms allow those viruses to be spread without the host having any idea that they are infected. Today, however, we are seeing the rise of cyber warfare. I won’t get into it too deeply here, but it is sufficient to point out that when the Russians invaded Georgia last year, they preceded their attack by launching attacks on the Internet infrastructure of the Georgian government. As computing becomes more centralized, it will be easier to cripple your foes by attacking their centralized communications systems.
I don’t have a great solution to this problem. Gmail is a great (except for the spying part) service and everyone uses it. This is just another one of those things where blind reliance causes complacency among those that will be most harmed when that relied upon no longer functions.