OPINION: Lesson learned for Sony

The ‘PSN crisis’ is thankfully over. The service is slowly rolling back out again, more secure than ever, and consumers have been handed some free content for the inconvenience.

Material effects of the actual ‘pain’ are still undefined. Obviously, PSN downtime suspended both ongoing revenues from first and third-party games and the audience of online players. But these issues may well be forgotten as new content rolls out and rekindles activity on the Network.

The real issue is that this ‘crisis’ represents a rude awakening of issues around personal data storage.

The theft of that data is deeply troubling. Sony’s had thousands of angry gamers telling it that through Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums for weeks. The phone probably rang off the hook at its developer, publisher and public relations teams. But now the company is implementing much stronger security for its current games system and probably all other network services it runs.

Although costly, this crisis in the cloud may well have a silver lining.