Blindly trusting subscription-based services is a mug’s game, argues Jon Honeyball

It was one of those panicky phone calls, the sort that happens when something has gone sideways. Bob couldn’t get his stuff to work. He was incoherent with anger and frustration, which didn’t help get to the bottom of the issue, but once he stopped sobbing, it became very clear that Something Was Not Right.

He was trying to get to the photographs held in his Adobe account in Lightroom, and “nothing worked”. This was during the recent outage from Adobe’s authentication servers, which brought customers to their knees.

No amount of saying “it will be back soon” seemed to help, and he had to wait it out until Adobe put some pound coins in the meter to start up the relevant services once again. All I could do was to offer him a virtual, socially distanced pint and say “oh dear”.

So you can imagine my delight when he phoned back a fortnight later. “Everything has gone now,” he whimpered. This time he was right, in that nothing worked at all. I went round, mask on face and bagful of sanitisers in hand, to dig further. The problem was obvious: his ADSL connection wasn’t. Connected, that is. Even a ritualistic rebooting of his BT router box didn’t resolve matters.

The only thing I could do to help was to get in the car, drive to the lab and to pick up the spare TP-Link Archer MR200 router I had there. This does all of the usual things, but can also take a 4G LTE SIM for the provisioning of cable-free internet. Of course, the 4G capability presumes that you actually have some coverage, but fortunately Bob lives within the line of sight of a 4G mast so that wasn’t an issue. I whipped out my spare Vodafone Business SIM, which has an “all of the internet and then some more too” allowance, just for good measure.

Within an hour or so he was back up and running, and at speeds that weren’t too shabby compared to his failed FTTC ADSL connection.

What’s the moral of this tale? I would excuse the answer of “don’t have a friend like Bob”, but he’s a decent chap and a good mate. Plus, the real answer is that we take far too much of this stuff in blind good faith. Everything is fine when it works, but when things go wrong, they often do so in a catastrophic way. It might not be your fault, like an ADSL line failure. Or maybe you said something unwise on Facebook and the powers that be have vaped your account. Either way, services that are outside of your reach, and often cheap to the point of costing nothing, are just fine right up to the point when they’re no longer there.

I can’t bring myself to rely on cloud services as primary storage because the lack of control makes me twitch in a nervous fashion. Hence my delight at using numerous Synology NAS boxes both in the lab and at home. I understand from friends that Qnap’s are just as nice, but haven’t tried them.

Bob now has a small but perfectly formed two-disks-in-mirror Synology box in his home office, and a second identical one in his garage. He’s decided that primary data storage in the cloud is fine for email but not for other data types, and that sub-based software services that can die on you and leave you stranded are for others. He spent an afternoon playing with Affinity Photo and Designer on my iPad Pro, along with the Apple Pencil, and almost had a shopping accident with Apple. Once I’d pointed out that both products were available for Windows desktop, that they were around £50 each and had no subscription back-end to worry about, he was hooked.

And that’s the problem with the cloud. Ultimately, it’s someone else’s computer, not yours. All the huff and puff in the world about “immediate scale-out and scale-up, geographically distanced resilience” dissipates like the morning mist on a summer’s day as soon as something goes awry. To be honest, I’m surprised that things work as well as they do, but it’s wise to remember that everything can break and you need mitigations in place. That rule applies to hardware, internet connectivity and your app services.

I confess that monthly subscriptions are starting to bring me out in a rash. And even the great god that is cloud-based Exchange Server might be the wrong answer when I have multiple Synology NAS boxes in the lab, connected with gigabit fibre connections to the internet. Maybe we’re going full circle, and it’s time to close the curtains on some of the changes that have crept up upon us over the last decade. Risk assessments need to be reconsidered and assumptions challenged. The “cheapest” and “easiest” solution can often turn out to be neither.

Everything is fine when it works, but when things go wrong, they often do so in a catastrophic way