In my recent whitepaper 'Is the Cloud Ready for You?' I made a comment regarding the dangers of relying on startups to act as trustees of your data. The focus of my comment was the relatively embryonic market and that many companies would be likely to hit the wall as the market matures. However, I did also and the sentence ...
"If the decision is to go with a start-up, what provision is there for recovery from failure? If that cloud start-up folds, what happens to its client’s data?"
This week saw a very real example of the nervousness that customers still have toward cloud computing when Smarsh, the online archiving company had an simultaneous outage of their network and telecom infrastructure.
According to the Compliance Insights blog, 'the official, who asked not to be identified, agreed that the problem is very serious - once we explained a worst case scenario where hundreds, if not thousands, of financial institutions may have lost access to years of email records. A more immediate concern is that these firms have no backup facility for surveilling incoming and outgoing electronic correspondence. '
It transpired that the worst case scenario hadn't happened.
Ken Anderson, the Communications Director of Smarsh was quick to point out that it has a temporary outage and that no data had been lost.
This does however raise the spectre of the cloud industry not being able to provide cast iron guarantees for data protection and availabilty. When you consider that the large part of Smarsh's customer base are financial brokers/traders and other institutions, the potential gravity of a 'worst case scenario' does not bear thinking about. Whilst on-premise systems are just as vulnerable to outages, the responsibility for data protection is something which should not be delegated to third parties lightly.
On a personal note, there is light at the end of my Immigration to the USA tunnel...we've got approval and are looking to travel w/c15th to our new home!
Matt