Lately it seems consumers are being barraged with commercials and advertisements for cloud services. “Send it to the cloud” is Microsoft’s latest catch phrase, but the consumer needs to stop and question exactly where he or she is sending that data and who is going to be maintaining it. There were recently two very high profile cases involving cloud services in the form of Google’s GMail and Yahoo’s Flickr. Here are two of the largest tech companies “accidentally” deleting the data consumers have trusted them to hold.

The Flickr scenario is mystifying. Why does a service with as large of a user base as Flickr have a system where a single employee has the power to permanently delete a user’s data? Shouldn’t there be some type of approval for the deletion of accounts by more than a single person? Why hasn’t Flickr instituted some type of temporary hold to maintain deleted data for a certain period of time? Aren’t these basic things that one would expect a company of Yahoo’s size to think of? These are the type of things that worry me when it comes to cloud services (not to mention having no idea where my data is held and who has access to it, but that is a post for another day).

Google’s situation is a bit more frightening. In this day and age email is arguably the most important form of communication and Google continues to advertise that your email is safe on Google’s servers, even safer than if it was saved on your home computer or your corporate network. Google will argue that its vast resources will allow for more efficient backup systems to maintain availability, and that confidentiality and integrity is better maintained due to Google’s superior security systems and personnel. With all this talk of how much more efficient Google’s service is than the traditional in-house mail server, 39,000 users logged in to find their mailboxes empty and years worth of email vanished. Google is currently working to recover the email, but the damage has been done.

The above scenarios are exactly what companies providing cloud services will need to overcome in order to convince the IT world to trust in the services they provide. Losing data in the age of cheap and available backup solutions is inexcusable for even a small IT shop, let alone companies the size of Yahoo and Google. Let’s hope that there are some lessons learned and internal procedures changed. Until then, I plan on keeping a backup of my Gmail and Flickr accounts local.

Hi everyone. The site is coming along slowly but surely, which the same can be said about my understanding of XHTML and CSS. Thankfully there is a treasure trove of information out on the web and there is no shortage of examples and code snippets to learn from. Along with information from the web, I have been reading two books about the subjects.

I started out with Building Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML and CSS by Ian Lloyd. The book is very much a beginners book, and you have to take that into consideration as you read through it. There are sections where the author spends a fair amount of time explaining basic technology that will completely bore a person with some years of IT experience under his or her belt. The book does offer some advice that is useful to both beginners and experts such as how to properly indent code and how important adding comments is to explain what the code is doing. The author instructs the user to build a sample site throughout the book, with the site and code getting a bit more complex with each additional chapter. This was a feature of the book that I appreciated, since I believe there is no better way to learn a concept than to see it in use.

Once I finished the book mentioned above, I purchased Beginning CSS Web Development From Novice to Professional. I haven’t had a chance to delve too deeply into this book and I have been using as a reference book more than anything else. I’ll review this book a bit more in-depth once I’ve had a chance to really dig into it.