What should we learn from Gmail failure ?

http://bit.ly/e6KA5k – What should we learn from Gmail failure ? After Flickr earlier this year (seehttp://bit.ly/iisWWz – Flickr accidentally wipes out account: five years and 4,000 photos down the drain), It’s Gmail turn to lose 40 000 mailboxes.

This emphasises that, either for personal or professional use, you need to be careful before jumping aboard the Cloud bandwagon. JP Rangaswami (SalesForce Chief Scientist) drafted 10 guiding principles about cloud services on his blog (http://bit.ly/gFWAJ7) and it’s a good start to confront your Cloud services operator. Especially on “Accountability” which includes data integrity, and therefore backup … As for me, even if I use Flick to post my pictures, I do not trust them to keep them safe, and I keep the HiRes source pictures on my computer hard drive, with 2 external backups. Call me paranoid …