Apple Snafu Highlights Perils of Cloud Computing | Newsweek News from MSNBC.com

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He said most of MobileMe's problems were likely were tied to its launching the same day, July 11, as the iPhone 3G and a key software upgrade for existing iPhone owners.

"The applications had to be ready by that date, whether they were ready or not," he said. "That's probably the biggest part of Apple's problems with MobileMe."

It seems Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn't think it was such a good idea, either, to put MobileMe out there the same day as the new iPhone. Web site Ars Technica said it saw an Aug. 4 e-mail sent by Jobs to Apple employees, in which he said, in part, "It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the (online) App Store …The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will."

Technology 'relatively new'
One of MobileMe's most innovative features is its ability to synch this data with a variety of devices, including the iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs.

"There is a lot of promise for cloud computing, but the technology is relatively new," said Rob Enderle, president of The Enderle Group, a consulting firm that studies technology trends.

"It works reasonably well for storage, but if you need it for communications, real-time 24/7, the reliability for these services is not there yet."

Enderle said Apple additionally may have been hampered because "they're not known for their servers. They have them, but they're hardly the largest. They're basically known for their devices — the individual things like computers, iPhones and iPods — stuff that exists in folks' hands that never had to scale" to meet the volume of demand generated by a program like MobileMe.

There are other issues still up in the air when it comes to cloud computing.

Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer for the SANS Institute, a national organization that does information security training, research and certification, uses cloud computing when he uses Google's Gmail, a free, Web-based e-mail service.

So do millions of others who use similar programs from Yahoo or Microsoft WindowsHotmail. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

"One of the big security problems with online services — in particular, Google — is accidental data leakage," Ullrich said.

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The logic about backup seems quite flawed here. Buy a device to keep it at home vs. have Google or EMC store it for you? Safe to say, if there is a fire in my house, the computer AND the backup drive are goners. If I back up using an on-line service, their servers are backed up elsewhere too, so presumably, if they have a fire or an issue, your documents won't be gone forever. You may have temporary access issues, but the odds of it being gone forever are much smaller than keeping on your own computer...