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IT'S NOT ALL SUNSHINE IN THE CLOUD
On the back of data breach, AWS loses TBs of data.
We have disaster recovery plans for a reason, they are our backup plan when disaster strikes — whether it's a natural disaster, an unexpected outage, malware, or most commonly, human error. Our backups are there as our fail-safe.What if your trusted backup plan failed? That's exactly what happened Labor Day weekend. At one of Amazon Web Services' data centers, a power outage fried hardware and resulted in lost and unrecoverable customer data.
Challenges of cloud storage like data loss and security risks are critical to consider when choosing your data backup solution.
Amazon's Data Center Power Outage
The Register reported that "When the power went out and backup generators subsequently failed, some virtual server instances evaporated — and some cloud-hosted volumes were destroyed and had to be restored from backups, where possible, we're told."Sources have reported more than 1TB of data in Amazon's cloud-hosted Elastic Block Store (EBS) was lost and the affected customers were told "the underlying hardware related to your EBS volume has failed, and the data associated with the volume is unrecoverable."
Accidents happen, but this is why you have backup and disaster recovery plans. That plan failing is unacceptable.
Cloud Data Breaches
This power outage comes on the heels of a massive data breach at Capital One affecting 100 million Americans and 6 million Canadians. The data that was breached was stored in AWS S3 buckets.Not long before that, Equifax had to settle for more than $575 million over a data breach (which they hid from the public for months) and which effected over 140 million Americans. And how many more were there that never made the headlines?
Why Public Cloud Storage is Risky
Traditional, pre-public cloud, disaster recovery strategies have largely stood the test of time. However, the new cloud adds complexity and variables which diminish the reliability of the solution.Incorrectly configured setups have compromised the data of large corporations and hundreds of millions of individuals and threatened the business continuity of countless companies.
Experienced IT professionals know that with all the promise the public cloud brings, it also brings a whole new set of challenges and risks.
The data center hasn't gone away, the cloud is just another degree of separation from the moving parts. Risks still abound, no matter how many nines of uptime are claimed. The complexity of the public cloud can be overkill for disaster recovery purposes. This is a great example of when less is more.
Why Hybrid Cloud Storage is Better
We believe hybrid cloud is the ideal balance between offsite flexibility and private security, like Net2Vault's backup and disaster recovery solutions. A hybrid cloud like Net2Vault can give you the advantage of a time-tested process, with expert US-based engineers who are trained to do this job specifically.How often is a storage admin expected to be an expert on several different platforms in a variety of disciplines? All the time, it's the norm. How well versed are you in public cloud security? Too often, lessons are learned the hardest way.
You should choose a disaster recovery and backup plan that you can count on, not a solution where you need to become an expert on a completely new product.
Reach out to our experts to discuss your data backup and disaster recovery needs.