We’ve been told for years now how important it is to back our data up to the cloud. At a consumer level, Microsoft, Apple and Google among others have made billions from people paying a few euro per month in perpetuity to guarantee they have enough space to keep all their photos, videos and files, many of which will never be looked at again.
Using the cloud isn’t a bad idea, of course. Cantillon can testify to that having a pile of old hard drives sitting in a shoebox, some of which still work but most of which don’t – evidence enough that the cloud is more user friendly.
But is the cloud foolproof, even for companies? Losing old photos can be upsetting and the loss of other files can be a logistical nightmare. But imagine being a business that loses 20 years of data because of a fire at a data centre where it was stored – in other words, in the cloud.
Just such a disaster has hit Indian firm, Matrix Cellular. The company, which provides international sim cards, finds itself somewhat crippled after a fire caused extensive damage to a data centre in New Delhi owned by India’s Tata Communications and Singapore’s ST Telemedia.
“Matrix has potentially lost access to over 20 years of accumulated operational and business data stored in the affected Tata data centre,” its boss Gaurav Khanna told Reuters. “It’s been 20 days and they have not restored backup. If there is a backup, it should have been restored by now.”
No doubt trusting data centres is inherently more secure than relying on servers at home, but as incidents like these show, they aren’t foolproof.
And it’s not just (presumably accidental) fires that can be a problem. As we saw in the early days of the Iran war, Amazon customers in the Gulf region faced temporary outages after one of the tech giant’s data centres in Bahrain was damaged by a drone attack.
It seems that for all our hope that the cloud will solve our data storage problems, no single solution will ever be perfect. It might be time to start rummaging through those hard drives in the shoebox again.
