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.

Comments

Re:incremental backups

[Ol Olsoc]

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.