Icebergs in the Clouds: the Other Risks of Cloud Computing
This work highlights critical, understudied systemic risks in cloud computing that could impact all users and industries reliant on this model, though it is incremental in expanding the discourse beyond security.
The paper identifies and explores largely unrecognized risks in cloud computing beyond well-known security issues, such as dynamic instabilities from unpredictable interactions in shared hardware, hidden failure correlations due to non-transparent layering, and exacerbated digital preservation challenges, arguing for proactive study before widespread socioeconomic dependence.
Cloud computing is appealing from management and efficiency perspectives, but brings risks both known and unknown. Well-known and hotly-debated information security risks, due to software vulnerabilities, insider attacks, and side-channels for example, may be only the "tip of the iceberg." As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or "meltdowns." Non-transparent layering structures, where alternative cloud services may appear independent but share deep, hidden resource dependencies, may create unexpected and potentially catastrophic failure correlations, reminiscent of financial industry crashes. Finally, cloud computing exacerbates already-difficult digital preservation challenges, because only the provider of a cloud-based application or service can archive a "live," functional copy of a cloud artifact and its data for long-term cultural preservation. This paper explores these largely unrecognized risks, making the case that we should study them before our socioeconomic fabric becomes inextricably dependent on a convenient but potentially unstable computing model.