James Fallows is famous among both technology journalists and China journalists (his Postcards from Tomorrow Square, written about his time in Shanghai and Beijing, is highly recommended), and rightly so. He built his reputation in the tech world, after an already illustrious career as a beltway journalist, by being willing to “get his hands dirty”, learning to code and develop software at Microsoft to get deeper into his stories. He’s no technical slouch, so it’s no surprise that his piece for the November 2011 issue of The Atlantic, “Hacked!”, was a thoughtful, well-balanced exploration of the advantages and dangers of cloud computing.

One of the most important issues raised by the article is the importance of scale. Cloud computing offers tremendous advantages in terms of economies of scale, to the point that Google can give away services that would have cost thousands of dollars twenty years ago- if they could be had at all. On top of this, no private user can possibly match the security capabilities of Google’s (or Microsoft’s, or Amazon’s, or Yahoo’s…) vast teams of engineers, who monitor their cloud servers twenty-four hours a day.

But there is a downside to all this. Such enormous cloud systems are magnets for hackers, and face thousands of attacks daily. While most are quickly repelled, many get through, and often wreak havoc on the files of users. And, while major cloud service providers do what they can, only minimal personal attention can possibly be bestowed upon a single user in a system hosting tends of millions of accounts. You’re a number, lost in the noise.

When Mr. Fallows’ wife’s account was attacked, he was fortunate enough to be able to call up and complain directly to a Google executive. But most of us don’t have his kind of connections.

Small cloud service providers (like our host, China Net Cloud) offer a solution- the advantages of the cloud, with the personal attention of a private IT department. With outsourced server management, small enterprise users can gain the advantages of utilizing cloud systems- mobility, extensive IT expertise, scalable hosting solutions, and always-on twenty-four hour monitoring- without sacrificing personal attention. Also, a plethora of small cloud service providers can prevent the dangers presented by a “cloud monopoly” – the not-unrealistic fear that a few major cloud providers with closed architectures could end up monopolizing all cloud services, hamstringing consumer choice and innovation by becoming a “Ma Bell” of the 21st century.

There are advantages in both the “big” cloud providers and the “small” cloud providers, and different users will call for different solutions. But no matter which one you go with, make sure to make personal data security a top priority.