And who could blame them?
What you need to know
- We asked our readers if recent outages have made them warier of their cloud dependence.
- A majority of votes indicate that recent outages merely confirmed their concerns.
- More than a 1/3 of votes call for more offline/local support.
Outages are nothing new, but they’re never fun, particularly when they disrupt our routines. Many devices are connected to the cloud and rely on that connection to get things done, so it becomes a problem when that connection breaks.
Given the recent AWS and Meta outages, we asked our readers whether these disruptions have made them reconsider their dependence on cloud services. A majority of our readers indicated that the outages merely confirmed their concerns for our reliance on the cloud, as pointed out by one commenter, joeldf:
I voted “no more than usual” because I’ve always been wary of cloud, and the latest issues merely confirmed it for me.
I have no issues with using cloud services generally. But I would never rely on them solely for everything. I keep a lot on local backups. For me, cloud stuff is more for convenient sharing. Not for holding everything.
On that note, readers also voted that there should be increased local/offline support for smart devices. This is mainly due to the fact that the recent AWS outage made some of the best smart doorbells unusable.
Of course, for those of you that use smart doorbells, there are always devices that don’t rely on the cloud. Still, the outages highlight how so many services people rely on can be disrupted by a single, random outage.
We never quite realize how many of our services rely on a single cloud service until things go haywire. That said, it’s always good to back up what you can on local storage and maybe rely a bit less on automation to get things done, as pointed out by The Wall Street Journal.
Nest Doorbell (battery)
$130 at Google
Google’s new battery-powered Nest Doorbell can work with any door, thanks to its wire-free design. It comes with an HDR camera with a 3:4 ratio, a vertical field of view, a built-in speaker and microphone, smart alerts, and local storage.