Hacker News Reader

Comment by fangorn | Hacker News Reader

When cloud was a young buzzword there was a popular test: replace "in the cloud" with "on the internet" and see if you want to continue.

- We store pictures of our kids [in the cloud|on the internet].

- We store all our proprietary code [in the cloud|on the internet].

- We store all our secrets [in the cloud|on the internet].

- We store all the sensitive customer information that we could be fined millions for losing [in the cloud|on the internet].

It still is a good test, but I guess this ship has sailed...

View on HN

Disclaimer: Senior Cloud Engineer for a $billion+ SaaS company here

I think this argument is only valid if you would use cloud services without private networking set up. The #1 skill a company needs if it wants to leverage the cloud is network engineering/security. There are things like Azure ExpressRoute and AWS DirectConnect that give you private access to the cloud providers own backbone network infrastructure to avoid sending traffic over the public internet. And if you are worried about securing the data at rest, you have everything available to encrypt and protect it. In my experience the problem is not that "the cloud" is insecure but companies trying to avoid the extra mile to properly set up their infrastructure for the sake of saving money and efforts. Sure, the hardware is not owned by you. But why should it be? Running this stuff at hyperscale is the more efficient and ultimately secure and reliable way.

The article lists decades of breaches, leaks and neglected security.

What are you going to say, when the next breach happens, might be at AWS?

Or the Government bans private encryption?

For some reason people find it rude to take the next logical inference from evidence... I hope you're not one of them.

Fool me once, shame on .. Fool me for a decade... !

I might just move a few things to Resilio Sync and/or Cryptomator where possible, altho I wonder if you feel similarly about such quasi-replacements. I definitely need something that preserves something somewhere dynamically so I don't have the worry about data loss which would absolutely be catastrophic. Some things are impractical to constantly have to manually and consciously version control to preserve, is the way I would phrase my sentiments.

Another test I like is replacing that phrase with "someone else's laptop/computer"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com