Cloud Computing and my company's data

Question

I am looking into Cloud Computing for my company. The one question that I can't seem to get out of my head is; What happens to my data and the ability to use it if the Cloud computing company goes out of business?

Answer 1

I would say that it depends on the company. I wouldn't assume anything about you being able to retrieve it if the company goes out of business. Even if you have a legal right to do so, it will probably take months of going through court orders and procedures to get at it after the company fails.

After the company goes bankrupt, I also wouldn't assume there would be any security protocols in place to protect it. Even if they say there will be, when a company goes under all bets are off.

A think to also remember is that even the most "well known" companies can fail in a heartbeat (Enron anyone). You never really know how well a company is doing until the financial statements (if any) are released.

Answer 2

Why don't you just keep a local backup of some sort? Also, you might want to stick with well known companies like Amazon where they probably wouldn't go out of business.

EDIT: As stated in the comments, even if Amazon stopped offering their cloud computing service it's unlikely that they wouldn't give users ample time to move their data off of their servers.

Answer 3

Obviously, you should pick a provider that you think is solid and unlikely to go out of business however the real answer is that you should have a replacement provider lined up and a plan for how you're going to switch if the main provider goes bust. The key parts of such a plan are:

• Make sure you own and control the domain names, and use a completely independent provider to run your DNS
• Set up a completely automated backup system which moves all data off your primary provider.
• Have the backup provider ready-to-run at all times with just a DNS switch
• Test your switchover process periodically

An outsourced server farm is really no different to any other outsourced function. You just need to make sure you're not locked into a single supplier.

Answer 4

Pick a solid provider and make regular backups of your data outside of the cloud.

Answer 5

You aren't alone. There are a lot of people asking this same question. Some advice to make sure you aren't left out in the cold.

1) Examine the terms of service carefully. Even some of the bigger players like Amazon reserve the right to terminate service with no more than 30 days notice. If you had your whole network infrastructure on a particular cloud, 30 days isn't a long time to build a new data center or move to another provider. This brings us to my second point...

2) Portability between providers is important. Proprietary cloud solutions (Microsoft Azure, Google NetApps, and to a lesser extent Amazon AWS) make it hard to transition easily to another provider if forced to. A promising option on the horizon is VMWare who is taking the approach of providing the cloud software and letting partners host it. This would theoretically give you a lot of portability between providers and potentially even let you use multiple providers at once so you have a failover. Also, since they are likely to use standard VMDK images, if you have an ESX server you could always pull the Virtual machines back locally if absolutely necessary.

3) Backups. Hopefully the cloud provider offers some method for creating backups, but it is advisable to have an offline version as well. The newer hybrid-cloud architectures where only some of your infrastructure lives on the cloud is attractive for this. That is, you could backup locally from the cloud.

Here is a good article wherein the author predicts the collapse of the Cloud marketplace and a rebuttal by GoGrid.com. Very interesting read since you get both sides of the issue.

“Don't buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate” Chuck Goolsbee – Dec 2008 http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1343864,00.html?track=sy540#

GoGrid.com’s rebuttal Michael Sheehan – Jan 2009 http://blog.gogrid.com/2008/12/31/dissecting-searchdatacentercoms-dont-buy-cloud-computing-hype-post/

Answer 6

Amazon and MSFT aren't going to shut down shop overnight.