Don't Trust the Cloud? You're Not Alone

Is it smart to use third-party services? asks Cameron Neylon at Science in the Open. In response to a comment to one of his blog posts, he tackles that question in a fresh post. Two sides to the question are whether that outside service provider is more or less reliable than your own hard drive, and whether that reliability will be offered over the long term. Neylon suggests a blend, or rather, trust no one. Institutional systems might put researchers who don't want to entrust their data to the cloud at ease, but these are often poorly managed. "The best situation is to have everything everywhere, using interchange standards to keep copies in different places; specialised services out on the cloud to provide functionality (not every institution will want to provide a visualisation service for XAFS data), IRs providing backup archival and server space for anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere, and ultimately still probably local hard disks for a lot of the short to medium term storage."