Another Case of "How far do you trust the Internet?"

Last week I reported on the major Internet outage that occurred in the Middle East and Africa. Here's the rest of the story, "Internet companies in the Middle East were still trying to restore connections for their customers today after an undersea cable the width of a human finger was severed, bringing down networks in the region." Two cables were cut by an anchor and a third was damaged by an unknown source.

Yesterday Blackberry users everywhere were without service for several hours. This is the second time that the Blackberry service has gone down in the last 10 months. It went down the year prior too. And don't forget that they were sued out of existence for patent infringement a couple of years back and are now no longer at the helm of their own ship. 

Google and Microsoft have created applications and file storage in the "cloud" (that's what they are calling the Internet these days). How far can we trust the Internet? When push came to shove all of the major players gave up email, text, IM, Internet search and cell phone call recorded information to the government in 2006. It violated the agreement for privacy that they have with you but they turned over your information anyway.

Call me old fashion but I like having control over my data. I like to know for sure that it's backed up. I like to know for sure that I have an email archive. I like to know that I don't have to depend on some third party that I can't get hold of, don't even really know who or where they are, to keep my data safe.

In a small way many of our clients have seen what can happen when you lose control over your data. I've been surprised at how many people lost control over their website, didn't know who hosted it, where it was or how to get hold of the person that they thought had it last. Imagine if that happened to your documents, your database or your email!

I trust the Internet to bring me information. I don't trust the Internet to hold my private, priceless information about by business.