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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.
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 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!
You missed the point of the article then.
What if your cloud service provider goes down? How you going to get all your data if you get only 1 day, or a week notice? How about if you get no notice, the shit just stops working? The company goes poof! So does all your data.
And you think that won't happen? Please, it is going to happen, sooner or later. Why do you think it's named The Cloud? Because clouds evaporate and disappear.
Be seeing you...
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.
Why would you want it to die? What was the upside of company's having to constantly worry about hardware budgeting when they wanted to do software projects?
Part of the issue with this is that people are hosting their entire servers on the cloud, not just a website
Because it is safe, secure, always up, and the way of the future. A company can lay off half or more of it's IT staff going to this wonderful cloud, and no more worries about backing up files, because the cloud saves money, is safe, secure, always up, and the way of the future.
Except when it isn't.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.