Friday’s Storms Raise Questions About Safety of Cloud Computing

The Goldberg family, from left, Oren, Elliette, Hannah, Laurel and their dog, Sophie, wait for Pepco to inspect the power lines outside their Verplanck Place NW home in Washington. A massive tree punctured the house when it fell during the June 29 storm. Several power lines snapped, littering the front lawn. A few are still intact, stretched close to the ground beneath the tree. "Before anything happens, they have to get here. It's not safe," Laurel Goldberg said.
Daniel C. Britt / The Washington Post - July 1, 2012

The Washington Post - by Craig Timberg - July 2, 2012

Storm-related outages at an Amazon data center in Ashburn prompted some congressional officials on Monday to question whether the federal government is moving too swiftly to put important data on private-sector cloud computing servers.

The outages affected companies such as Netflix and Pinterest, not the government. But several federal agencies have moved e-mail and other services to cloud servers, which are housed at remote data centers and typically managed by technology companies such as Amazon or Google.

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