Cloud computing is all the rage today: everyone wants us to migrate our digital activities to the “cloud”, that is a new world of remotely hosted data and services. This is no science-fiction: if you have a Gmail or Facebook account you are already using cloud computing today.

There are, of course, many advantages to the cloud concept, but also some inherent and serious risks. This report from 2021 explains them:

By 2021, Governments, Universities, public companies and all public services were in the cloud. So were all the books, movies, songs and design files produced in the last decades. Individuals relied on remote hosting for all their personal documents. With energy costs continuously rising, cloud providers had to concentrate all the data in less, enormous and super-efficient server farms adjacent to lowest-cost generation facilities. Experts estimated that c. 85% of all of the world’s important data and software was now hosted in twenty-three gigantic data farms around the world.

Then, in 2021, twenty-three terrorists annihilated the collective knowledge of humanity in less than one minute, by simultaneously launching twenty-three bombs on those data centers. In doing so, they also destroyed all the public services, from health care to transportation, energy distribution and weather forecasts, that were running entirely in the cloud. In the first winter that followed, a billion people starved to death.

Interesting scenario, isn’t it? If you want to read the whole story, please go to the original article by Andy Updegrove: Avoiding a Cloud Computing Armageddon.