CenturyLink is a relatively small Telecom player, but they are the main provider of traditional (wired) phone service in Las Vegas. They are also aggressively moving into competitor Cox Cable’s typical realm: TV and Internet. Which is why Adobe should talk to them.
You see, Tuesday, CenturyLink’s internet service went down all across the country. Something went wrong with their core servers, and more than a million customers nationwide lost Internet service…including Las Vegans. From 1:30am till about 10am tons of people had to make-do without their internet.
So why should Adobe Systems care? You know…Adobe: the software powerhouse…the developer of Photoshop and Premiere and Acrobat, and — especially for many Voice Actors — Adobe Audition.
Well, coincidentally, Adobe announced yesterday that Adobe’s aggregated Creative Suite software product would be moving to “the cloud”. That means designers, photographers, videographers, web developers, and voice actors will be getting future versions of Adobe software from an online server, not from an installed CD set.
I get it. Everybody and their 3rd cousin is moving to the cloud. I’ve extolled the virtues of the cloud a number of times in this blog. Overall, I think moving programs, storage, and communication online is a brilliant idea, and a juggernaut that can’t be stopped.
Then…something like CenturyLink’s outage happens.
Alright, then, just so you know…this is the risk we accept by moving to “the cloud”. If you were expecting to upload your final audio files from your Las Vegas home to a needy client on a Tuesday morning deadline, you would’ve been in trouble. Maybe if you had a neighbor with Cox internet, and he owed you a favor, you might’ve gotten it done.
Also (and you heard it here first)…if the Chinese keep up their unabated hacking into American Defense systems, you can expect this to happen a lot more…I’d even go so far as to say that future wars will be fought online, not on desert steppes. In fact, the USA would be hobbled by cyber-attacks on our internet system, water systems, energy grids, you-name-it.
But that’s not today, or tomorrow…just down the road. In the meantime, if you don’t use Adobe Audition, get ready for Avid, or Sony, or any of the other audio-software developers to go “cloud” too, and within a year or two.
And if I were you, I’d be seeking reassurances from YOUR local provider that they have a back-up plan when their “core servers” go down.
CourVO
