The Cloud Doesn’t Exist
The cloud doesn’t exist. There’s a warehouse with servers inside, on a specific piece of land, in a specific place in the world. On March 1st, someone was reminded of that.
Iran struck three Amazon data centers. Two in the UAE, one in Bahrain. Banks down, payments frozen, delivery apps offline. Millions of people with no access to anything. This is the first documented military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider, ever.
Data is usually replicated across multiple locations. Amazon’s system is designed to survive the loss of one availability zone. Not two. Two zones hit simultaneously, and the system fails. That’s exactly what happened.
Think for a moment about how many things you only have online: tools, files, workflows, suppliers, banking systems. Everything on the cloud.
There’s another angle almost no one talks about. It has nothing to do with bombs, it’s about governments. Your provider guarantees confidentiality, says no one else sees your data. But the provider has a headquarters, it’s registered in a country. And that country, in many cases, has legal authority over its data. It can knock on the door and say: give me those files. The company may have signed anything with you, but the state comes first. And often, the state is not required to tell you.
There are countries you’d never want to share your data with. Less friendly countries. And yet your data sits there, in a warehouse, in that country, under that country’s laws.
Ask yourself where your data physically is. Not in the cloud. In a building, in a country, with that country’s rules on top. What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #AI