Many higher education institutions have come to rely on cloud services for everyday tasks. Personally, I use Dropbox almost daily to exchange files with my cross-campus colleagues; less frequently, I’ve also used Yousendit. However, with the recent demise of Megaupload, and the subsequent self-enforced neutering of FileSonic and uploaded.to ( they quickly limited their file-sharing services and are only allowing users to  retrieve  files they have personally uploaded), what is the future of cloud reliability? At issue was the silent and swift action by the government which took many of Megaupload’s users by surprise. Many who did not have backups lost their files and data.

So, should we be using Cloud services? If so, how should we secure our files? and how do we secure our privacy if a cloud service DOES go down? where do our files go? We should be asking these questions and having conversations at an institutional level about backing up data and security.