Megaupload Underscores Importance of Cloud Contingency Plans

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Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners.

There's no doubt that piracy was rampant on Megaupload. Sam Biddle over at Gizmodo believes the feds narrowed their focus on Megaupload because its owners ran around "like sloppy drug kingpins". But despite the illegal file sharing going on, there was also a great deal of legitimate file storage and sharing that ended up becoming causalities of the shutdown.

Additionally, it would seem that the DOJ and FBI aren't finished yet. There are other file-sharing sites very similar to Megaupload, including Rapidshare, YouSendIt, DropBox, and even Apple's new iCloud. Users of all these cloud storage and sharing services can easily transfer copywritten material across them. So even though these services may be operated in a more professional way, they can all facilitate criminal copyright infringement.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is where cloud computing gets scary. By outsourcing your infrastructure, storage, or applications, you are relying heavily on an external entity. A huge amount of trust is placed in a third party to keep your applications and data safe and accessible. Can you really trust someone else that much? Do you know who all of Amazon EC2's customers are? And if one or more companies are found to be engaging in illegal activity on the EC2 network, who's to say the DOJ won't simply shut the entire network down?

I may be exaggerating a bit by saying the DOJ would shut down all of EC2. But it underscores the point that contingency plans should be developed in the event of a catastrophic failure in the cloud. We can no longer assume that temporary outages are the major concern of cloud computing. Instead, we need to start thinking about the time when the cloud completely goes offline -- for good. What's your contingency plan for that?