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If Your Cloud Vendor Goes Out of Business, Are You Ready?
storagedude writes: With Amazon Web Services losing an estimated $2 billion a year, it's not inconceivable that the cloud industry could go the way of storage service providers (remember them?). So any plan for cloud services must include a way to retrieve your data quickly in case your cloud service provider goes belly up without much notice (think Nirvanix). In an article at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman notes that recovering your data from the cloud quickly is a lot harder than you might think. Even if you have a dedicated OC-192 channel, it would take 11 days to move a petabyte of data – and that's with no contention or other latency. One possible solution: a failover agreement with a second cloud provider – and make sure it's legally binding.
This is the same problem we've always had, whether its someone's website on a shared host or a colo server. You need to back it all up and doing a naive dump of the entire thing will take too long and cost too much in bandwidth, so you take a dump of the entire thing once (preferably when you have the thing you're deploying locally) and then take incremental backups from there.
The big question is what's the best backup tools to do this, and do they work on cloud systems that don't look like real servers? eg. I recall rsoft that did very good incrementals based on disk blocks changing so the backups were also continuous. Not sure if that'd fly on AWS.
Here is to hoping the cloud is a fad that dies off even though it probably won't. I can see the private cloud being beneficial but a private cloud is just marketing speak for a virtualization environment. One positive to come out of the cloud has been software as a service which again is marketing speak for renting software. I like the ability to use Office 365 and essentially rent my copy of Mac Office 2011. I haven't checked out Apache Open Office or Libre Office recently so I don't know if they have improved, but (unfortunately) Microsoft Office is still the gold standard.
If Amazon closed shop I GUARANTEE you the Federal Government will be able to get it's data regardless of what happens.
I hear you need a cloud to backup your cloud.
I hate hardware and for all intents and purposes it can go shove itself up its own ass. As a result I very much love the cloud, no matter how much of a buzzword it is. Let someone else worry about the tedious busywork it is to get one piece of hardware to talk to another. Oh what's that? A disk died? I don't give a damn because I don't have to drive 30 minutes each direction just to change it. Ha!
Bit of a luddite here when it comes to networking. I mainly write low level stuff for a living, so I get to avoid the server side of things.
Anyhoo, what is the point of the "cloud"? Outside of pay as you use scalable computing and free programs ran on internet instead of your cpu I've never seen the use of the "cloud." Why would anyone pay to host files on it or run websites? Once you get into the $50 range you can rent a dedicated server and in the $100+ ranges you can get rack space and use your own hardware. So what's the advantages to cloud storage/webhosting?
I have Domain Controllers and a Public IP. And access to Tablets that run Cyanogenmod, They have the OwnCloud Client, and I have Root Control of my Tablets. My Domain controllers, at least one of them, sits in a Room and hums away and it has a Mirrored RAID. I can gain Physical access to this machine, and I can Collaborate with other users in my Domain. I can Print and Scan using my Cups and Sane Clients under Android. Even from far away. I have the ease of the Cloud with the security of knowing my data is mine, and not someone else's.
Legally binding?
...which you should have backed up somewhere obviously, not only on a single cloud storage location
I thought the goal was to get your data back*, not to start a lawsuit.
*
I find that local backups are better than cloud backups. I have a 1TB external hard drive that's nearly filled up. This drive cost me around $100 a few years ago. To get 1TB of backup from Google, for example, I would need to pay $9.99 a month. So I can either pay $120 yearly for 1TB of storage space or I can buy a new hard drive every year with increasing disk space. (Currently, $120 will get me a 3TB external hard drive.) With two of the drives, I can have one located somewhere "off-site" in case something happens to the location of my primary hard drive (fire, theft, etc).
Don't get me wrong, cloud backups can be useful. I can have my phone auto-backup photos and videos to the cloud which is helpful in case something happens to my phone. It also means I don't need to worry about backing up my phone as often. Still, for the most part, I've found local backups to be easier to manage and less expensive than cloud backups.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
How is that supposed to work when everyone in the world is trying to do the same thing?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Do those actually accomplish anything when the entity who signed teh agreement just when bankrupt and disappeared? I cannot imagine there is anyway to enforce any agreement on an entity who is legally dead and without any remaining assets of any kind.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Even if a large cloud provider were to get out of the business they are going to handle things in a responsible way and move their datacenter, hardware and data to someone else. And that's almost certainly true for the smaller players as well. That hardware and data is worth money even if not as much as it cost to buy. The bondholders are going to want $.60 on the dollar rather than $.00 on dollar if they can. But even if we assume that weren't true there are still options. Many of the colo companies which remember sell 30% of their space to the telcos are already using their cross connects for cloud-to-cloud moves the same way they do now for carrier-to-carrier. So for example from Equinix you can go between AWS, Azure and Verizon (Tarramark).
Almost all the small cloud players are renting space and will move data to physical drive or DAS or SAN. If they are growing broke just find out where they host, buy their hardware storage and keep it in the same colo your data is at now as a colo deal.
This is the sort of thing your cloud agent can handle for your company for free. I get that Joe-IT manager isn't plugged in enough to the industry to know whose hosting what where and what interconnects they have but that doesn't mean the data isn't readily available. This article is mainly just ignorant of how the industry works.
Make sure you keep your resume up to date and on local storage. When your company's cloud vendor fails...print your resume and use it to get a job somewhere else.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Especially with this article on the SAME PAGE.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Whenever a company says it is losing money on something, you have to take that information with a grain of salt. AWS is probably just paying another Amazon division for services at an astronomical rate. Corporations shift money internally all the time, and the result is that it can appear that one part of the business is hemorrhaging money.
If you place your data on someone else's computer, and you don't have local duplication, then you are just asking for any number of problems:
1 - your data goes public.
2 - you data goes away.
3 - Both of the above at the same time (in some sense)
If you keep your data local, you own it, you control it, and you know where it is. No other company can go out of business and take your data away.
The major problem is keeping backups and making sure you don't lose it.
Backing up to the cloud is good, as it solves the issue of backups (as long as the cloud vendor doesn't go away the day you need your backups). However it still exposes you to all the issues listed above.
Privacy means keeping things to yourself. If you give it away to someone else, it isn't private anymore. I don't care what they say about 'we protect your data'; someone will crack it.
Citation please.
Mostly clouds are more expensive than doing it yourself, unless you fire your sysadmin(s) as part of the deal.
Korma: Good
And mirror it with another one. Problem solved.
.. is the new HDD crash?
Funny how some things tend to be cyclical in nature.
Back int the 60`s and 70`s, computing was handled by the giant beast mainframe systems that very few could afford....
Then came the 80`s and the personal pc took off...Cheap computing (relatively) for EVERYBODY, no longer did you need to pay the Data Barons a king`s ransom for basic computing stuff....
Fast forward to 2014....The Data Barons are trying to re-centralize it all......
Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it....Centralized computing sounds good on paper, in practice however it is very very very bad overall for everybody (other than managers seeking to cash out a nice bonus by slashing short term expenses)......
You simply do not understand how "cloud storage" works.
We had all this even back in the 1980ths, just using different buzz words. All these storage/service-solutions do a win-doublewin-bet, they do not aim at a short term profit, they try to claim their market share. As soon as the competitors start to fail and die or their architecture become dominating they will just raise prices or at least stop lowering them.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When Kim Dotcom's cloud hosing business suddenly got seized by the US Government, several cloud hosted services got shut down with no notice, no failover and no options. That was on Slashdot back then.
There are ways that businesses can be forced into failure by entities that don't care about the customers' data.
Imagine a cloud company that fails to pay the rental or purchase payments on the server hardware, or their datacenter fees. Those vendors might just walk into the datacenter and repossess the equipment, or cut off power and network without notice.
Our SaaS is hosted on both AWS and Azure. It one goes down, the other picks up the slack. It is far from easy to configure, but you want real redundancy you need to do it.
In the sub prime mortgage disaster AIG insured for a very low rate against the impossible (or so they thought) possibility of all these mortgage backed bonds and whatnot collapsing. So quite simply they didn't have enough in reserves to cover all the losses. The government ended up stepping in. But in that case the government can just make money out of thin air. They can't make servers out of thin air.
So assuming some company is willing to take your money to provide ready access to a failover crisis how do you know that they can handle the load, it might be like all the Titanic passengers trying to get into way too few lifeboats. Also if something like AWS ever went belly up you couldn't buy a server or find another co-location fast enough. Every other service out there would be instantly swamped even if they didn't double their prices overnight.
My sites are small enough (I don't want them to be) that I could round up enough hardware to host them locally for a while.
But this does potentially make a case for finding some slightly older hardware and doing development on it in your office. The idea would be to have enough hardware to be able to somewhat, or even entirely service you basic server needs. It might not be pretty but it would be way better than 100% down and panicked calling to every cloud host out there.
I find that local backups are *a great compliment* to cloud backups.
For $100, I can back up all of my business data locally (we have less than 300GB of actual, unique data); I presume a 3 yr failure on external drives
For $100/yr, I can backup and synchronize all of my business data in the cloud*
So for $133/yr I can have a backup in case the cloud provider goes belly up overnight (cough*Livedrive*cough), and I can have a cloud backup in case the building catches fire (or floods, or gets hit by a tornado, or is an extra in the next Avengers movie).
Considering the value and/or convenience of the data we have from almost 12 years in business, it's worth the extra to keep it safe.
*actually, I have two cloud services. One is for real-time sync and access to the files from remote locations, one is solely for backup. It's likely they use the same vendor through (prob. AWS) so there's no actual redundancy there.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Oh yeah I'm sure they are, that's why Amazon Web Services is going to build two new Australian data centers, to lose even more money.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Oh wait...I read the news too fast, and I missed the 'u'.
Use meta cloud scaling tools like RightScale or Scalr. Create hybrid cloud solutions across AWS, RS Cloud, Google, Azure.... doesn't matter.
Seriously, unless there is a very real business need ( and no, the CIO jumping up and down about TEH CLOUDS is not a legitimate business need ), keep your data under your control. Not only does this alleviate the problem of bailout should your provider die on short notice, but it also solves the security of cloud data rather nicely.
Granted, that someone even has to point this out shows just how deep the marketing bullshit is on this.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I have a perfect, 100% effective solution to this problem: I don't, and never have used 'The Cloud' in the first place. It's a stupid concept, it's poor data security, it's a waste of money, and you're asking for trouble if you use it. Store your data some other way that you have 100% control over, don't let complete strangers do it for you.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Storage is hardly the issue. Most companies won't have anywhere near a petabyte to move.
The real problem is whether PaaS or SaaS will screw you. If all your data is written to run on a platform which is closed (AWS, Google...) you're utterly screwed. Cloud software is also never updated like proper applications. Improvements are made incrementally and if AWS went tits up, even if you manage to get a copy of the hosting platform, you'll be stuck with whatever bugs were in the last build.
IaaS isn't too bad, but otherwise Cloud is just a BAD idea.
I am currently working with a company that had all its web-based material "in the cloud". Somehow their account got wiped out and the cloud provider didn't maintain backups. So now all their data, their website, probably e-mails too are all gone. I'm trying to help them rebuild and create redundancy. Perhaps it is interesting to note the new solution will probably be less expensive for them in the long run, even with redundancy.
Well, how big can a torrent be? Just wondering...
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
when Netflix stops using AWS. And Expedia. And NASA. And the CIA, fer cryin' out loud.
Sheesh.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This is why projects like OpenStack and OpenShift are so important. If my provider dies, I can take it anywhere else easily, or throw the whole thing onto my own hardware and keep chugging along. In fact, I'm amazed more talk about Hybrid Cloud hasn't caught on - keeping the core of your data and services in your own datacenter and bursting to public cloud when it makes sense based on the need for capacity and the type of workload.
Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. But also I think it's silly to assume enterprise-oriented cloud providers are going to disappear overnight. Your social media and personal cloud stuff? Yeah, it could disappear at any time, because as an individual you're uninteresting and an unreliable income source. A big company with a six or seven digit cloud hosting contract with an SLA? Yeah, their provider isn't disappearing tomorrow.
If you don't own and maintain your own machines, you will forever be at the mercy of the people who do. Your downtime, your critical windows, your business continuity, your backups ... do you really want these things controlled by someone else?
Many of us have always looked at the cloud and thought "what a terrible idea". What are the chances that, unless you actually test it, your fail over to another provider will actually work?
If Amazon is losing $2 billion/year, it's hard not to think other people are thinking the same thing. And they're only going to keep losing that much money for so long before someone says "enough".
The cloud isn't magical, and it isn't immune to economics.
And if all of your business critical data is in the cloud and you haven't made plans to keep it going -- well, that sounds pretty irresponsible and reckless.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think the best of both worlds is to have the live system in the cloud, but have on site backups of all those systems.
That way if/when the cloud dies, you can still have access to all your data.
I find that cloud backups are an excellent complement to local backups. I have a 6TB Synology unit at home that stores all our family photos, Time Machine backups, scans of all our important docs, etc. I love and trust that little server. I also have it configured to ship nightly backups to Amazon Glacier so that if my house burns down and takes the Synology with it, I can restore it all and have my digital life back.
I guess I could buy a second unit and keep it at work, but that's a lot more effort than setting up a scheduled job to sync everything up to a remote server without my manual intervention.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This looks like it would have that problem covered, along with a lot of other concerns like data encryption...
http://www.omnicloud.sit.fraun...
I'm not stupid enough to trust my data, encrypted or not, to someone else. It's my data and my responsibility to keep safe, not some company that could go out of business. Sorry, a few really bad experiences and the rest of the world might wake up to this cold hard fact.
This question should be aimed at CIOs and managers. Most of them do not visit Slashdot. And if you really get hold of them, the answer is, no, they are not ready.
You obviously missed the NIrvanix debacle. They simply gave customers a month to get their own data out. Short of taking a hand truck to their data center it wasn't at all easy to migrate everything over the net.
At Amazon you are paying $30k a month to store 1PB. Downloading all that data off their network will run you an additional $60k in outbound transfer fees.