Cloud Computing Could Give You Shelter From Storms
You need to have a disaster plan in place before a devastating event like a tornado. The cloud could help by separating your data from your business.
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
~Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm.
One thing we have learned over the last year or two is that disasters can strike anywhere.
When the earthquake hit in Japan last year, lots of data centers were no doubt put out of commission for at least a period of time. When a freak October snow storm struck Massachusetts last Fall, some places were without power for more than a week.
And the disasters seem to be happening with increasing frequency. How can you as an IT Pro protect the data side of your business? Well, the answer could come via the cloud.
As I wrote in Data Center in a Box Could Save Your Butt in Disaster, there is actually a product that ships to you within a couple of days after an outage — and gives full data center capability in a unit about the size of a large refrigerator.
But should it actually have to come to that? In some instances, it’s unavoidable, but in many cases you could save your organization a lot of pain by storing your data in the cloud where it’s in another location and backed up across multiple locations.
It actually makes little sense to keep your data center where you do your business because if disaster strikes, not only is your business hosed, so is all of your data. You can always find office space somewhere away from the center of the disaster but getting your data back could be a stickier matter.
The cloud can help and given that the cost of storing data in the cloud continues to drop, it’s not only cost-effective to move your data to the cloud, it’s downright sensible.
As I’m sure you know, there are risks associated with the cloud too. Cloud vendors are not immune to natural events any more than you are as the lightening strike that shut down both Amazon’s and Microsoft’s Irish data center last summer proves. But the cloud gives you a better chance of saving your data in the event of major disaster in the vicinity of your business and that’s the way you have to look at it.
Cloud vendors also tend to have redundant backups and storage across multiple centers in multiple geographic locations to hedge against that disaster shutting down large groups of their customers (although as we’ve learned it can still happen).
If your business is in a hurricane or earthquake zone, then I probably don’t have to tell you that you need to have your data backed up somewhere far away from the business location. This is just common sense. It may be that you can spread out your data centers just by virtue of the size of your organization, but not every IT department has that luxury.
That’s why you need to sit down as a company with all of the stakeholders and come up with a unified disaster plan. Now, how you implement that plan will depend on the size of your organization, how spread out you are geographically, your tolerance for using the cloud as a backup medium and so forth.
But you need to think about this before you’re down for a day, a week or even worse that you’re dead in the water. The cloud makes sense for a lot of companies, but not for everyone for a variety of reasons including, for example, privacy rules in the EU, but you can’t deny the cloud offers you safe harbor (in most cases) when that disaster inevitably strikes — and you should at least consider it as part of your overall strategy.
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The picture is exactly right but the article is wrong. The cloud is not a cloud at all but a natural disaster awaiting personal computing freedoms.
ANTI-CLOUD CAMPAIGN
no harddrive = no freedom!
Buntfu,
I don’t agree that going to the cloud implies the death of the hard drive. What the cloud does is give you an offsite backup separate from your hard drive. I certainly as individual take advantage of both internal and external local drives as well as cloud back up.
Hi there Ron,
I understand at the moment that “the cloud” mainly means backup, besides a few services like email. But the argument against cloud services is a very real and logical one. Consider it like this.
Imagine you have a physical document file which has lots of personnel details about your life in it such as your bills, bank statements and family photos.
Then imagine that you hear of a new document storage facility just opened for business in the middle of the Atlantic, based off of an old oil rig. You get a hold of their terms and conditions and they seem acceptable. And being safety conscious, as you are, you make copies of all your documents, put them in a new file, and send it off to the stated address (BP oil-rig, middle of the Atlantic) for safe keeping.
So, seeing as you now have two copies of everything and they are each in different locations, you have mitigated one risk category. However, you have introduced a couple of new ones. Firstly, You have sent important and sensitive documents off to a company who’s employees are anonymous to you. And second, just like the “cloud” your documents are located slap bang in the middle of no-mans land (or sea, in this case).
Please understand, there is absolutely no comeback with these companies with which you implicitly trust your personal data. And worse, you could be taken for every penny you have. Because you willingly gave your sensitive data to a group of strangers. Or how about they do some irreparable damage to your reputation? Not to mention the fact that you might not be able to get a hold of your stuff when the shit hits the fan. Are you going to drive half way around the world to get it back? From where?
And this is only the data storage problem. When the mass of unknowing and strangely trusting “consumers” start using the SaaS model of cloud computing, thats when these companies have us right where they want us.
These cloud services are NOT setup for your benefit, they exist as an option to make money from you, nothing more. Trouble is, there is absolutely no value in them. If you want to store stuff off site, start a data swap with a friend or something,
Buntfu has it right,
“The Cloud” = Stupidness.
Nick,
If you really feel that way, my suggestion is you unplug your computer and walk away. At the very least, unplug from the Internet because the risks you cite are inherent in using the Internet. You could just as easily have written “Internet”=Stupidness.
I really don’t “feel” any way at all. I *know* giving your private data to a complete stranger for no reason whatsoever is ludicrous.
Would you take a map of the world, stick a pin in it randomly, find the closest address, and send you private data to it for “safe keeping”? really?