In my last technical article on the Cloud, I mentioned the break in and theft of 70-100 million player IDs from the Sony PlayStation Network. The above infographic talks about the nature of the damage done, the costs to the company and the ramifications to our society as a whole. I cited this as a potential sample of the dangers of distributed computing in its current formats, before even addressing the capabilities of the cloud, we need to get issues such as this on in order. The cloud will simply make this more possible and affect a greater number of people over a wider array of potential clients. The real cost of this breach to Sony including its 70-100 million lost IDs and passwords is $318 per single user, the cost is up 48% from last year. This means valuation based on the amount of money each breach is worth has gone up due to the number of successful breaches worldwide and the effective means of utilizing the information gathered on the black market.
A Matter of Scale 