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Megaupload action puts cloud services in spotlight
Companies from Microsoft to EMC have been active in Saudi Arabia in the last year, pushing businesses to begin shifting their applications and data into the “cloud.”
These vendors have been touting all the positives of the cloud such as the high availability of data and the ease of collaboration. With local Internet speeds improving, tech savvy individuals have been turning to cloud storage and services as well, particularly for photographs and important documents.
And then on Thursday, people were forced to pull their heads out of the cloud and re-examine strategy, as the US Justice Department shut down the operations of digital storage and sharing service, Megaupload, for alleged copyright infringement. In the past, access to Megaupload has been intermittently blocked by both the Saudi and the UAE Internet regulators due to the use of the service for the distribution of unacceptable content. Currently, users have no access to files stored on the service’s servers — even legitimate data such as business and personal records.
Megaupload is one of many services offering online storage and file sharing, although extensive sharing of data hosted by such services is often limited premium fee paying customers. Rapidshare, YouSendIt and Dropbox are other well-known data storage and sharing services.
Kamel Mardini, chairman and CEO at Gateways Middle East Business Consultants has recently become an avid user of Dropbox, switching from the MobileME service. He noted that it’s very convenient to have such an online storage locker because it enables him to access the latest version of the files he’s working on from any Internet connection, using any of his three computing devices. He can easily share a large file with someone else without clogging their e-mail inbox. “There’s no need to individually update a file in my tablet, PC or Mac. The latest version of a proposal or other business document is always available,” Mardini said. “My PC crashed recently and I didn’t worry about it. I just downloaded five or six gigabytes of data back into the computer and I hadn’t lost anything.”
Mardini is concerned though that people aren’t aware of the published terms of use for any of these storage services and it’s a serious issue. Not one of these publicly available online storage and sharing services makes any guarantees about the safe storage or accessibility of the data. While individuals or companies own the data they store, their access to it may be cut off without any warning or cause. In most cases the entire liability of the storage locker provider is limited to the actual cost collected for the service.
Companies from Microsoft to EMC have been active in Saudi Arabia in the last year, pushing businesses to begin shifting their applications and data into the “cloud.”
These vendors have been touting all the positives of the cloud such as the high availability of data and the ease of collaboration. With local Internet speeds improving, tech savvy individuals have been turning to cloud storage and services as well, particularly for photographs and important documents.
And then on Thursday, people were forced to pull their heads out of the cloud and re-examine strategy, as the US Justice Department shut down the operations of digital storage and sharing service, Megaupload, for alleged copyright infringement. In the past, access to Megaupload has been intermittently blocked by both the Saudi and the UAE Internet regulators due to the use of the service for the distribution of unacceptable content. Currently, users have no access to files stored on the service’s servers — even legitimate data such as business and personal records.
Megaupload is one of many services offering online storage and file sharing, although extensive sharing of data hosted by such services is often limited premium fee paying customers. Rapidshare, YouSendIt and Dropbox are other well-known data storage and sharing services.
Kamel Mardini, chairman and CEO at Gateways Middle East Business Consultants has recently become an avid user of Dropbox, switching from the MobileME service. He noted that it’s very convenient to have such an online storage locker because it enables him to access the latest version of the files he’s working on from any Internet connection, using any of his three computing devices. He can easily share a large file with someone else without clogging their e-mail inbox. “There’s no need to individually update a file in my tablet, PC or Mac. The latest version of a proposal or other business document is always available,” Mardini said. “My PC crashed recently and I didn’t worry about it. I just downloaded five or six gigabytes of data back into the computer and I hadn’t lost anything.”
Mardini is concerned though that people aren’t aware of the published terms of use for any of these storage services and it’s a serious issue. Not one of these publicly available online storage and sharing services makes any guarantees about the safe storage or accessibility of the data. While individuals or companies own the data they store, their access to it may be cut off without any warning or cause. In most cases the entire liability of the storage locker provider is limited to the actual cost collected for the service.
