Sony admitted this week that hackers had stolen personal information, possibly including credit-card details, of many of the 77m-plus users of its online-gaming and entertainment networks. Amazon, an American online retailer and provider of “cloud computing” services, has suffered a lengthy breakdown at one of the giant server farms whose storage and processing facilities it rents to other companies.
The two lapses, though unconnected and different in nature, have raised the question of whether customers can really trust the basic idea behind the cloud—that you can buy computing services from the internet, just like gas or water from a utility.
Read more at The Economist
