If Your Cloud Vendor Goes Out of Business, Are You Ready? 150
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.
incremental backups (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the same problem we've always had, whether its someone's website on a shared host or a colo server. You need to back it all up and doing a naive dump of the entire thing will take too long and cost too much in bandwidth, so you take a dump of the entire thing once (preferably when you have the thing you're deploying locally) and then take incremental backups from there.
The big question is what's the best backup tools to do this, and do they work on cloud systems that don't look like real servers? eg. I recall rsoft that did very good incrementals based on disk blocks changing so the backups were also continuous. Not sure if that'd fly on AWS.
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Depends on what the problem with the colo server is. It's not entirely unknown for police to seize an entire rack of servers from a colo. (E.g. 1 [slashdot.org], 2 [slashdot.org], and I half-remember incidents in other countries too).
Re:incremental backups (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Except when it isn't.
But that's a problem for the *next* CTO.
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Except when it isn't.
But that's a problem for the *next* CTO.
Who will insist rightfully on a computer system that he can control.
As I told my boss once, I need to be able to let whoever is keeping me from getting the work done know that it is important to his or her employment.
And I've never had an outside vendor who doesn't think of me as "Just another customer". They'll take care of a few urgent projects, then invite you to go elsewhere.
So many bad things about cloud.
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Gosh, I'm running out of "I told you so" moments lately. First it turns out that Open Source networking software can have spectacularly serious security vulnerabilities after all. Then it turns out that Linux is not immune to worms and other malware. Now you're telling me that outsourcing everything to a remote system and remote staff of unknown competence, unknown security, unknown reliability, unknown solvency and business planning, and assorted other uncontrolled risks might not always be the best soluti
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Now you're telling me that outsourcing everything to a remote system and remote staff of unknown competence, unknown security, unknown reliability, unknown solvency and business planning, and assorted other uncontrolled risks might not always be the best solution to every problem in computing? Seriously? :-)
Nah.... I was just kidding. hehehe. Of all the vulnerabilities, the cloud is the absolute worst one. I can go a long way toward protecting my stuff locally, but having no idea of the service provider or their security practices, means you might do as well to trust your 10 year old son the Jerry Sandusky. The Elephant in the room, remains the fact that despite using as much encryption as you like, the bad guys can make your data inaccessible, the cloud is data suicide. Microsoft's cloud shutdown some months
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What's the problem? The NSA can always get your data back for you? Right?
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The colo server - if the provider goes bust, you might turn up att heir doors only to find it locked down and facing a lengthy battle with the administrators to prove its your kit. Even then, when you get it back both hardware and data will be obsolete.
Re:incremental backups (Score:4, Interesting)
You can do the same things just not on the file levels. Most of your clouds are using a SAN for databases. SAN's do backups like you say. You create matching LUNs on both devices and incrementally track changes to blocks between the SANs. You can just ask your cloud provider what SAN they are using and have them configure this sort of setup for you to another provider.
In the case of AWS they provide backup servers directly connected to their production servers so you just backup to AWS. And if you want to move the backup from there to somewhere else it is trivial since it is already organized for backup.
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I can't imagine a cloud storage vendor allocating a LUN per customer. Cloud storage is likely highly abstracted in a way that makes "your" LUN not just some SAN LUN.
Maybe in a data center where you buy storage on their SAN. Even then, they are unlikely to be interested in LUN replication to another provider even if you could find another provider running the same SAN at the same software level where it would be compatible.
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Of course they are interested. That's a standard process of replication. Most of the cloud providers offer all sorts of cross cloud backups and replications. They understand that their customers do business with multiple vendors and better to be one of their vendors then not get the account at all.
Also most of the SAN vendors have systems that virtualize within their product lines. The storage, is as you mentioned highly abstracted.
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Sunguard, Terramark, Navisite, Helion... all do replication. I'm hard pressed to think of a single one that wouldn't with possible exceptions like AWS and Azure who provide sophisticated backup from their production clouds to other backup oriented clouds.
The cost is going to be pretty similar. The cloud vendor is getting c
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With this in mind, having colo equipment can be just as good, if not better than using a cloud provider:
1: The equipment is yours, not theirs, so if the colo goes under, you pull your stuff out of the rack, call it done.
2: Generally you have physical control over your racks, be it a locking door on either side, or a cage (dancers not included) with one's racks inside it.
3: If you put in a SAN, proper switches, a stack of 1U machines (or rack/blades), a decent VM infrastructure (VMWare, Xen, etc.), manage
change paradigm to *onsite* backups (Score:3)
I think the best of both worlds is to have the live system in the cloud, but have on site backups of all those systems.
That way if/when the cloud dies, you can still have access to all your data.
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This is the same problem we've always had, whether its someone's website on a shared host or a colo server. You need to back it all up and doing a naive dump of the entire thing will take too long and cost too much in bandwidth, so you take a dump of the entire thing once (preferably when you have the thing you're deploying locally) and then take incremental backups from there.
I agree with this approach. If you can get an initial full backup and then use something like RSync with a cron job to handle the incrementals, that would be ideal.
Some info regarding RSync with EC2 is here: http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]
One of the worst offenders when it comes to data exports has to be salesforce.com. If you delete a single custom object they charge you upwards of $10K USD to recover your data: https://help.salesforce.com/HT... [salesforce.com]
Even worse, you get it back in CSV format. My form
My thoughts (Score:2)
Re:My thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)
Cloud offers a lot of real advantages over doing it all yourself.
1. Having resources when you need it. Lets say you have some seasonal tasks that needs extra horse power (Quarterly Reports, Christmas Rush, Back To School, Exam Time...) so you can request short term extra power to keep up. Without having all this extra equipment running nearly idle for 3/4 of the year.
2. Hardware upgrade, maintenance, backups... Keeping your hardware up to date is expensive, if you are keeping your old servers you will try to keep them for 6-8 years normally as to get the most out of them. However that means your servers are getting behind the times and are at risk of breaking. As well having to pay for redundant backup servers. Managing good data backup and storage policies. While might be easy for a couple of servers for larger demand it could become a huge waste of your time. The cloud company should be doing this maintenance. They get the advantage of dealing with a larger set.
But I don't like cloud for the sake of cloud. Adobe Cloud, Office 365 and most of your software that you really just want on your PC and not pay a monthly fee for. Sure cloud backup such as Google Drive but your device has adequate power to run these apps without a huge server farm in the background.
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As well having to pay for redundant backup servers. Managing good data backup and storage policies. While might be easy for a couple of servers for larger demand it could become a huge waste of your time. The cloud company should be doing this maintenance.
Key words there being "should be". You won't find out that they aren't until your data is gone.
Re:My thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want it to die? What was the upside of company's having to constantly worry about hardware budgeting when they wanted to do software projects?
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Not for Federal Customers (Score:2)
If Amazon closed shop I GUARANTEE you the Federal Government will be able to get it's data regardless of what happens.
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i suspect they'd get *everybody's* data, not just theirs.
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If they haven't got it alreaD ,.$@
%^..
no carrier
I hate hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I hate hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate hardware and for all intents and purposes it can go shove itself up its own ass. As a result I very much love the cloud, no matter how much of a buzzword it is. Let someone else worry about the tedious busywork it is to get one piece of hardware to talk to another. Oh what's that? A disk died? I don't give a damn because I don't have to drive 30 minutes each direction just to change it. Ha!
You missed the point of the article then.
What if your cloud service provider goes down? How you going to get all your data if you get only 1 day, or a week notice? How about if you get no notice, the shit just stops working? The company goes poof! So does all your data.
And you think that won't happen? Please, it is going to happen, sooner or later. Why do you think it's named The Cloud? Because clouds evaporate and disappear.
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This should be part of any companies DR strategy. If they don't have the provider going down, the same way they assume a DC goes down, then they aren't doing their job.
We use DropBox, and we keep a local mirror sync'ed within our own servers. We use the service for the efficiency, but if they went belly up, we already have all our own data and would just be looking for a way to fill the efficiency gap.
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while not a complete data center, we do have a few racks.
The mentality you have to have when dealing with the "cloud" is how can i utilize it to make things better. Not "lets just shove it all up there" just like having that one box in the back-office that is the only one that can do something, you have to treat the cloud as a point of failure. When you design IT systems, you to the best of your budget try to mitigate single points of failure. Your budget is what limits the bounds in which you can do tha
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read my other post. local SAN unit is sync'ed with dropbox and then incorporated into our local backups so we have point in time.
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What if your cloud service provider goes down? How you going to get all your data if you get only 1 day, or a week notice? How about if you get no notice, the shit just stops working? The company goes poof! So does all your data.
Not the best analogy, but: in case of bankruptcy, shutdown, or death, a medical doctor's practice/office/heirs are required by law to store the patient records & provide them or transfer them upon request. Similar legislation is needed for data storage service companies. (Oh,wait-- intelligent legislative action in today's Congress? Putting a burden on the Job Creators? nevva mind)
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I hate hardware and for all intents and purposes it can go shove itself up its own ass. As a result I very much love the cloud, no matter how much of a buzzword it is. Let someone else worry about the tedious busywork it is to get one piece of hardware to talk to another. Oh what's that? A disk died? I don't give a damn because I don't have to drive 30 minutes each direction just to change it. Ha!
You aren't encumbered by any compliance regulations, are you. Just sayin'...
I have Domain Controllers and a Public IP. (Score:2)
I have Domain Controllers and a Public IP. And access to Tablets that run Cyanogenmod, They have the OwnCloud Client, and I have Root Control of my Tablets. My Domain controllers, at least one of them, sits in a Room and hums away and it has a Mirrored RAID. I can gain Physical access to this machine, and I can Collaborate with other users in my Domain. I can Print and Scan using my Cups and Sane Clients under Android. Even from far away. I have the ease of the Cloud with the security of knowing my data is
Legally binding? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the goal was to get your data back*, not to start a lawsuit.
*
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Moreover, if a big cloud vendor quickly closes shop, interdependencies and network effects are likely to have an impact on your contingent vendor.
We have hosted email, and will likely move to Amazon Glacier for DR backups; we have local snapshot backups that give all the information locally that would go to Glacier; it is just the earthquake/sprinkler/sabotage scenario that offsite would protect us against, and Glacier is starting to get competitive for our needs.
Like everything, it is a scenario you need a
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Legally binding = You are in the pile of creditors!
Local Backups (Score:5, Interesting)
I find that local backups are better than cloud backups. I have a 1TB external hard drive that's nearly filled up. This drive cost me around $100 a few years ago. To get 1TB of backup from Google, for example, I would need to pay $9.99 a month. So I can either pay $120 yearly for 1TB of storage space or I can buy a new hard drive every year with increasing disk space. (Currently, $120 will get me a 3TB external hard drive.) With two of the drives, I can have one located somewhere "off-site" in case something happens to the location of my primary hard drive (fire, theft, etc).
Don't get me wrong, cloud backups can be useful. I can have my phone auto-backup photos and videos to the cloud which is helpful in case something happens to my phone. It also means I don't need to worry about backing up my phone as often. Still, for the most part, I've found local backups to be easier to manage and less expensive than cloud backups.
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I have two hard drives that I keep synced up. Right now I'm pushing my space constraints on the 1TB hard drives and need to invest in some 3TB drives. Were I doing this via the cloud, I'd be paying $120 a year for the space I need. Instead, I'll pay a one time ~$120 cost (if not less) for each hard drive and use them for years.
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You might want to check out cloud backup services again. I think you could get by with more like $50 or $60/year these days. I'd include links, but I don't have any specific provider to endorse.
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I'd be very interested in what sites offer 1TB (or more) of space for $50 - $60 per year. I just priced it out again in case the prices or storage changed since the last time I looked. Both DropBox and Google Drive are $9.99 a month for 1TB, Amazon Cloud Drive is $500 a year.
Carbonite is $60 a year, but that's per computer. Right now, we back up both of our laptops to an external hard drive (and then copy that to a second external hard drive). If I wanted external hard drive backups, I'd need to spend $
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This is where the bubble lies. 1TB of raw data storage costs ~$90 these days without power, maintenance, installation, support, data transfer, failover/redundancy/backup... over 3-5 years (the usable life of these drives) at current market prices, you should probably calculate close to $1500 to store and maintain 1TB of data that is properly backed up, redundant and available.
The current cloud providers (Microsoft included) are counting on you NOT using your storage beyond 5-10%. Once everybody starts using
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If your single $100 drive fails, you lose all your data.
No, he doesn't. He loses all of his backup data. In order to lose data, he must have simultaneous failure of both his primary and backup storage.
You might argue that this isn't enough redundancy for your data, but that's neither here nor there. GP is willing to take the risk that both his primary and backup storage might fail simultaneously. This is not an unreasonable cost-benefit tradeoff for many people.
Incidentally, I'm more in alignment with your position on the cost-benefit side. Personally, I keep au
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Removable drives work well to a point, but you need at least 3 for a proper rotation. You also have the issues of failure rate and potential for theft, which eventually drive you to the SAN/NAS route which gets expensive quickly. Cloud services for our business have a sweet spot around 4TB of live data; businesses with highly distributed workforces may nap have a much lower threshold.
Cloud services seem to make sense to me for small companies not wanting to invest in servers and to minimize consulting, or
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Additionally, in a year you may get much more for your $10 per month. I'll give an example using Linode - when I first started using them 10+ years ago, I paid $20/mo for 32mb ram and a few gigs of storage, and about 20 gigs of transfer IIRC. I still pay $20/mo... but I now have not quite 50gb on SSD drives, 2gb of ram, and 3tb of transfer.
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This is a solved problem before cloud providers ever came around, and still can be solved effectively.
Any enterprise-grade SAN has asynchronous replication as a feature, so one can set up a remote site with critical data backed up in real time to another location. Done right with DNS failover, the downtime of a completely lost data center may be minimal.
Even before SANs, there was tape. It seems archaic, but modern LTO tapes are quite fast, have usable capacities, and have very easy to use encryption [1]
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Both systems have their advantages and drawbacks:
Local backups, advantages:
1.) Lower cost/GB.
2.) Control over data.
3.) Backups done on demand.
4.) Multiple users/devices can be backed up on the same drive.
Local backups, disadvantages:
1.) Backup of mobile devices gets interesting.
2.) Backup schedule needs to be adhered to; most people forget until the day after they need it.
3.) Cost/GB narrows if more than one external disk is purchased to protect against disk failure.
4.) Opportunity cost - performing backups
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Why do they have to be exclusive options? I backup locally to a server under my desk, and remotely to the cloud. In the (more likely) event of an HDD failure I can restore as fast as my server can spit the data back out and be up and running in a few hours. In the (less likely) event of a catastrophe like a fire it might take a while to restore everything but at least it's not gone forever (and if I'm willing to pay they'll fedex me all my data on a drive). If the cloud provider go bust I still have my loc
Re: All the Backups (Score:2)
I find that local backups are *a great compliment* to cloud backups.
For $100, I can back up all of my business data locally (we have less than 300GB of actual, unique data); I presume a 3 yr failure on external drives
For $100/yr, I can backup and synchronize all of my business data in the cloud*
So for $133/yr I can have a backup in case the cloud provider goes belly up overnight (cough*Livedrive*cough), and I can have a cloud backup in case the building catches fire (or floods, or gets hit by a tornado, or
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I find that local backups are better than cloud backups.
I do both. As far as I'm concerned it's simply stupid to not have local copies of everything that's important to my business, particularly given that hard drives cost something like $40/TB at this point. I keep stuff in "the cloud" for easy access, but I insist on keeping local copies of everything.
I make my customers do this, too. Their music is in the cloud for one purpose only: to ease distribution. They have to keep local copies of everything. They bitch and moan but it sure as hell beats losing ev
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Your equation makes cloud backup seem much more appealing... $200 more expensive but likely to save me DAYS of work. I currently have three hard drives sitting in my electronics cupboard with offline backups (all slightly out of sync) waiting for me to recover and reconcile them. What a pain.
I'm using 1tb storage for $10/month from Microsoft that includes copies of Office for five devices, which I'm happy with. (and I work at MS so if my cloud provider fails then I'll have lots more worries as well :) )
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Two hard drive docks are cheaper. ( In case one fails. )
Then as many internal harddrives for backup as you need.
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Having all of your data off-site in the cloud without local back-ups is as foolish as having all of your data local with no off-site back-ups.
Remote Backups (Score:2)
I find that cloud backups are an excellent complement to local backups. I have a 6TB Synology unit at home that stores all our family photos, Time Machine backups, scans of all our important docs, etc. I love and trust that little server. I also have it configured to ship nightly backups to Amazon Glacier so that if my house burns down and takes the Synology with it, I can restore it all and have my digital life back.
I guess I could buy a second unit and keep it at work, but that's a lot more effort than se
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That's essentially what I do with the pics I take with my Android phone. New photos get backed up to Google+ automatically immediately after the photo is taken. Later I pull them off my phone (Google+ downsizes to 2048x2048 unless you pay)
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I find that local backups are better than cloud backups. I have a 1TB external hard drive that's nearly filled up.
What you have described is not a backup. It's a copy, a copy which is sitting right next to your original; subject to most of the same threats as the original. I wish you luck.
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I know everyone loves to hate on "Cloud", but it serves as a great and easy option for off-site backups. That being said, if you are dumb enough to rely only on the cloud for backups with no local copies backed up, then you deserve everything that is coming your way when your cloud service mysteriously drops off the face of the earth.
Part of this is that many of us have suits coming up to us all the time saying this or that should be in the Cloud. They have no idea what they're talking about or whether the Cloud is an applicable solution. They just know it's the new hotness and think their boss will be impressed if they do things in the Cloud. We then have to explain why it may not be the best solution, and risk being seen as an obstacle to leveraging the Cloud. Plus, the Cloud is marketing speak and is annoying to those of us who l
That's with no contention or other latency (Score:2)
Failover Agreement? (Score:3)
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should be auto fail over, and at the first signs of this issue you should force the fail and shift. If not then your sysadmin's asleep at the wheel.
You don't need the bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if a large cloud provider were to get out of the business they are going to handle things in a responsible way and move their datacenter, hardware and data to someone else. And that's almost certainly true for the smaller players as well. That hardware and data is worth money even if not as much as it cost to buy. The bondholders are going to want $.60 on the dollar rather than $.00 on dollar if they can. But even if we assume that weren't true there are still options. Many of the colo companies which remember sell 30% of their space to the telcos are already using their cross connects for cloud-to-cloud moves the same way they do now for carrier-to-carrier. So for example from Equinix you can go between AWS, Azure and Verizon (Tarramark).
Almost all the small cloud players are renting space and will move data to physical drive or DAS or SAN. If they are growing broke just find out where they host, buy their hardware storage and keep it in the same colo your data is at now as a colo deal.
This is the sort of thing your cloud agent can handle for your company for free. I get that Joe-IT manager isn't plugged in enough to the industry to know whose hosting what where and what interconnects they have but that doesn't mean the data isn't readily available. This article is mainly just ignorant of how the industry works.
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Lease payments, power, bandwidth are all expensive in a colo. If you are out of cash, you are in trouble. Your assets could be used to wind down operations gracefully... Or to your point to repay your creditors.
Hopefully Google, Amazon, or Microsoft would give reasonable notice of a pending cancellation of a service, but there are no guarantees.
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The assets are most valuably deployed in winding down operations i.e. selling people their data back. Particularly remember lots of cloud providers that don't sell dedicated bandwidth charge for data going out but not going in. So for example data into AWS is free but out it is $50-60/p and they might raise that a bit during a surge. That's what the creditors are going to want to do with the assets short-term. So even if the company were broke financing would step in to cover a month of two of colo cos
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Of course there are no guarantees. If you need an absolutely guarantee then you need multiple types of backup. Same as local where a backup type can fail. My point is though that what the article is worried about is nonsense. With high probability there is going to be an orderly liquidation.
Now the more interesting issue is what about a cloud provider that doesn't have infrastructure. Say for example backup company X has $500k / mo cloud bill on $700k / mo in revenues during good times. Times have not
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You must have missed the last bubble or you are very naive. Whatever your 'cloud agent' promises you is false. These types of companies go bust and disappear in less than a day, the company will have let the service degrade so far by then that a single hosting company unplugging a system over non-payment topples the entire infrastructure. And the provider itself won't have told anyone it is going bust, most likely it will have stunted with pricing in order to get more customers, loading their systems even m
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No they don't. These types of companies stop offering a service to new clients then slowly shut it down. For example Verizon decided to move away from their public cloud offering they didn't close the company. IBM (Softlayer) had dropped thousands of products in its history.
No
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Well yes. But we are moving from what is likely to happen to what could theoretically happen in a worst case. And even with stupid management someone is going to want those accounts and those assets. A bad shutdow
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Pretty much what happened there was what I said. They continued operating for a few weeks. With the usual options for getting data out. Then IBM took control. There was good network connection to HP so HP restored their entire system to a private cloud inside their setup where of course the customer could become an HP customer and get their data. Nirvanix got a loan of $1.1m to fund operations for the liquidation and was able to continue to move data off.
How is that a negative example?
Only one way to deal with this problem (Score:3)
AWS losing $2 billion a year? (Score:3)
Re:AWS losing $2 billion a year? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah this. I can't find a source for this claim. According to Wall Street Journal [wsj.com], AWS' revenue is only a $1.2billion per quarter. It would have to be losing at least $500mil/quarter to make a $2 billion/yr loss. In other words, for every dollar you spend on AWS, they're really losing $.50 or so.
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Good luck finding a citation for that, because that $2B number came directly out of someone's posterior. Amazon has long frustrated investors by not breaking out revenue numbers for AWS. Instead, they lump AWS in with all of Amazon's other side businesses as "other revenue".
No one outside of Amazon has a solid P&L for AWS.
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Re:AWS losing $2 billion a year? (Score:4, Funny)
Amazon Web Services losing $2 billion a year [slashdot.org]
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Yeah, couldn't help but notice that the basis for the whole article is also the piece with nothing to back it up.
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rtfa
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That link wasn't there originally, nor (IIRC) did it say "estimated".
Given the new information, then it doesn't matter. AWS is running at some sort of loss, but the question is why are they running at a loss. Are they spending lots of money on new infrastructure and scoping out new locations for data centers? That all costs a lot of money to implement and it would show up as a loss. Given how well the rest of the company is doing (AMZN would have had a profit if it were not for AWS), it sounds like reve
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Plus there are reasons for recording a loss in one business unit to show a profit in another. Tax avoidance is the most obvious, but there are others.
If, for example, Amazon isn't charging itself market rates for it's streaming services it can show positive cashflow for that (new) service while absorbing the losses in the datacenter books.
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Given the new information, then it doesn't matter. AWS is running at some sort of loss, but the question is why are they running at a loss.
Everyone is running cloud services at a huge loss because prices have been driven down so much that it is simply impossible to run a profitable cloud service. Of course, the companies are doing that to drive their competitors out of the market and profit afterwards by using a combination of price hikes and vendor lock-in effects.
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If this were Amazon vs. rinkydink provider, I'd buy that. When it's Google vs. Amazon vs. Microsoft, they have the resources to slug this out for as long as they want.
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Would that not be amortised over several years for precisely the reason that you don't want large one-off costs affecting one periods results?
Any beancounters care to comment?
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Perhaps, and maybe that's the problem. I'm sure they're growing at a really rapid rate. If you grow like that for 10 years, there's going to be a lot of amortized expenses that will catch up if you're growing that quickly every year.
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rtfa
Well, that's pretty shitty advice, now isn't it. TFA says that one analyst estimates a $2B loss over the previous 4 quarters and then just waves its hands and says, "So let’s assume that these estimates are true, and let’s also assume that since Google and Microsoft do not break down cloud services that it is also true for them."
So apparently since one analyst estimates that AWS might have lost $2B over the prior 4 quarters, we can just assume that AWS loses $2B per year, and that Google and Mic
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yeah I would like to see that as well. I think if that is true, is because they are investing money into growing it instead of going for short term profits. They have added a lot over the last couple years.
Not a shock people aren't prepared for this (Score:2)
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That's all well and good, except if Azure's, behind the scenes, is running on AWS. Or vice versa.
Thankfully nothing like that would ever happen where it really matters, like in finance.
They could AIG you (Score:2)
So assuming some company is willing to take your money to provide ready access to a failover crisis how
AWS lose an estimated $2 billion a year (Score:2)
Oh yeah I'm sure they are, that's why Amazon Web Services is going to build two new Australian data centers [slashdot.org], to lose even more money.
Easy Mitigation Strategy (Score:2)
Use meta cloud scaling tools like RightScale or Scalr. Create hybrid cloud solutions across AWS, RS Cloud, Google, Azure.... doesn't matter.
Plan 1: Don't use "The Clouds!" (Score:2)
Seriously, unless there is a very real business need ( and no, the CIO jumping up and down about TEH CLOUDS is not a legitimate business need ), keep your data under your control. Not only does this alleviate the problem of bailout should your provider die on short notice, but it also solves the security of cloud data rather nicely.
Granted, that someone even has to point this out shows just how deep the marketing bullshit is on this.
"The Cloud", LOL (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have a perfect, 100% effective solution to this problem: I don't, and never have used 'The Cloud' in the first place. It's a stupid concept, it's poor data security, it's a waste of money, and you're asking for trouble if you use it. Store your data some other way that you have 100% control over, don't let complete strangers do it for you.
I beg to differ. We use cloud storage to keep copies of some very important documents (compliance requirements) that are central to several business processes. One copy we store locally, and the other we store in the cloud. Both are encrypted before storage so the security question is meaningless. You could lift all those files, from either location, and have nothing without the key. What's not meaningless is the savings we gain by using the cloud for that backup copy. Duplicating that store, including the
Haha... Yeh that's the problem :/ (Score:2)
The real problem is whether PaaS or SaaS will screw you. If all your data is written to run on a platform which is closed (AWS, Google...) you're utterly screwed. Cloud software is also never updated like proper applications. Improvements are made incrementally and if AWS went tits up, even if you manage to get a copy of the hosting platform, you'll be stuck with whatever bugs were in the last build.
IaaS isn't too bad, b
I'll worry about this ... (Score:3)
when Netflix stops using AWS. And Expedia. And NASA. And the CIA, fer cryin' out loud.
Sheesh.
If you don't own it ... (Score:2)
If you don't own and maintain your own machines, you will forever be at the mercy of the people who do. Your downtime, your critical windows, your business continuity, your backups ... do you really want these things controlled by someone else?
Many of us have always looked at the cloud and thought "what a terrible idea". What are the chances that, unless you actually test it, your fail over to another provider will actually work?
If Amazon is losing $2 billion/year, it's hard not to think other people are
wrong audience to ask (Score:2)
This question should be aimed at CIOs and managers. Most of them do not visit Slashdot. And if you really get hold of them, the answer is, no, they are not ready.
Dumbing down your organisation (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
scalable is the reason, also not having to manage your own hardware is also a bonus. We just don't have the time to run down to the colo office to replace a hard drive.
Our amazon bill is approx $180/month for about 6 servers (reserved pricing) no way we would be running hardware that cheap if we were doing it ourselves.