Ride the Lightning

Forecast: Cloudy With a Threat of Lost Data

January 9, 2014

One of the dangers of storing data in the cloud is the possibility that a cloud provider might fail and go into bankruptcy. That happened with Nirvanix last September, when it suddenly warned customers of its impending shut down as it went into bankruptcy. It gave customers just a couple of weeks to migrate their data, though the deadline was ultimately extended to late October.

So what do you do in these circumstances? As a recent CRN article noted (hat tip to Sean Harrington), you can go to a public cloud like Amazon in a hurry, but that might not be where you want to store sensitive data. It is a good idea to have a backup plan and to have relationships with several cloud providers if you are big enough to justify that.

Fox and NBCUniversal held data at Nirvanix – so this was not a tiny operation with minor players. These days, we are asking for enough bandwidth to push petabytes of data from one cloud to another – only the largest providers have big enough pipes for that.

The article discusses some of the prudent planning to go through in this scenario, but the prime piece of advice is to make sure that data is backed up to an appliance in a separate location. The author even says "Shame on customers and partners who did not have an extra copy of that data." It is the old adage "don't store all your eggs in one basket" that comes to mind.

Without proper preparation for this eventuality, the jilted customer will incur a lot of costs that could have been avoided and potential brand damage if data is unavailable and this impairs the functioning of the company. This is not a "whoops" you want, so your business continuity plans should always assume the failure of a cloud provider. This way the forecast is always for fair skies.

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