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What Happens To Data When a Cloud Provider Dies?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the up-in-smoke dept.

Lucas123 writes "When cloud storage providers shut down, as four have done in the past year, users are left wondering how they'll get their data back and whether they'll be able to migrate it directly to a new service provider. More importantly, analysts say, what guarantees do they have that the data stored offsite will be deleted after the shutdown. Currently, there is no direct way to migrate data to another provider, and there are no government rules or regulations specific to data managed by cloud storage providers."

5 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Capt. Obvious reports. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As if people weren't losing any data when "the cloud" was called "shared hosting".

  2. Well... by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You take your chances if your hosting your data somewhere outside of your control. Unfortunately, when any company goes broke, customer concerns tend to go out the window as the major creditors swoop in to grab what value they can.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    1. Re:Well... by mlts · · Score: 5, Informative

      Don't forget that all SLAs, privacy agreements, and other items are not worth the paper they are printed in come a liquidation. We all heard the adage that possession is 9/10s of the law. It applies here too.

      After a bankruptcy, the new holders of the servers can do anything they please with the data on the boxes. PII data about bank accounts and HR records? It can be put as a torrent for all to download, sold to a firm offshore for ID theft, sold to advertisers. There is not one single thing anyone can do about it, provided there is no confidential or classified data present. Trade secret? By law, it isn't a trade secret anymore.

      One of the downsides of cloud computing is that all data, be it E-mails on a cloud system, offsite storage, or applications in house can easily be made public to sell to all comers should a cloud provider go bankrupt or change hands. No amount of paperwork can ever go to assure against that.

      Only real protection? Encryption, with keys stored with the client, and ONLY with the client. Even then, it still isn't good for cyphertext data to be made public for all and sundry to try to figure out the contents.

  3. Risk Reward... by BoRegardless · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A cloud based form of backup or duplicates can only be one leg of a system to protect data. Gotta have at least 3 legs to stand on.

    The reminder that 4 services closed in one year is fair warning.

  4. To all Cloud entrepreneurs & VC's by MagikSlinger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dear Cloud entrepreneurs and VC's:

    If you are wondering why businesses aren't trampling themselves to go to a public cloud, here is half your answer. The other half was the Amazon outage. A CIO does not like depending on an outside company for his uptime metric. He wants total control. If there is an outage, he wants HIS people on it reporting to HIM. He doesn't want to go back to the CEO, "the cloud provider is working on it and there is nothing I can do to make it go faster."

    If clouds happen, it will mostly be private clouds under the company's control. Sure it may not have as high uptime or be more expensive, but at least it's under their control. You surrender control going to an external cloud.

    --
    The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com