I’ve been getting a number of e-mails and comments asking why I haven’t yet written anything about the Russian/Georgian war and the supposed “cyber-warfare” taking place. ZDNet has written extensively about the DDoS attacks being waged against Georgian government sites.

At first, I thought that this was solely a security issue. As a general rule, I don’t like to talk a whole lot about computer security on Network Performance Daily because I lack the proper mindset to get around security – security experts are people who look at things and see how to break them down, network performance experts are generally people who look at things and see how to build them better. Besides, there are tons of blogs out there about computer security, and very few about network performance.

I’m not going to get into the geopolitical aspects of it, except to say that getting involved in a land war in Asia is one of the “classic blunders.”

However, I did start thinking about things… I mean… wasn’t the Internet partially designed to be a resistant form of communication in case the Russians ever attacked? The irony of the Russians effectively taking down a country’s Internet is… well, it’d be funny if it wasn’t for all the people dying.

What this does tell me, however, is that cloud computing (and I’ll continue to call it that despite Dell’s claim to the term,) has a long way to go. While the Internet can be cheaper and simpler than having a fully-fledged IT department monitoring in-house servers and applications on leased lines over a WAN, the one problem that in-house IT has licked is fault.

For the most part, we’ve managed to get it so that we no longer worry about fault on the enterprise network. It was a while ago that we passed the 99.999% uptime mark. So while we may worry about security and performance, we typically don’t have to worry about the network not working.

But cloud computing still has fault problems. And it doesn’t take the Russians attacking. I love Stumbleupon, but they went down for a few minutes yesterday – Twitter also, but they’ve got problems. Even Gmail, which I greatly rely upon for my personal e-mail, went down for a little while earlier this week.

By and large, cloud computing makes great solutions for smaller companies and start-ups because of the low cost, low maintenance, and portability. However, the tradeoff is reliability – Internet applications simply aren’t as reliable as the bulky solutions that get things done when a single hour of downtime can mean thousands in lost business.

There really is no such thing as a private cloud. The entire concept revolves around using IT services offered from outside companies, which connect on public lines through to shared servers.

This is not to say that there is no room for the cloud in enterprise computing but that incidents like the South Ossetian war show that Internet applications suffer from one fatal flaw: They’re on the Internet.