The Cloud Is Safe Again, They Say

The good news is that a month after T-Mobile took its Sidekick PDA devices off the market because of a colossal failure of its cloud-based storage, it’s back on the market again. For those of you who can’t live without the device that helped make Paris Hilton famous, you’ll be happy to know that it’s now had a price cut so you’ll feel better when you buy one.

The other good news is that apparently very little data was actually lost. Once T-Mobile and Microsoft (which owned the server that died and ate the data) got finished with data recovery, just about everything was restored. I’m sure you feel much better about that, too.

But before you get carried away in a feel-good haze of total happiness about storage in the cloud, ask yourself if you really want to risk access to your data, if not the data itself. The bad news about the Sidekick data loss was that users lost access to their stored names and addresses for a while – some for a few hours, and some for weeks.

Now, I realize that you’re probably smart enough not to trust mission-critical information to a Sidekick, but that’s not the point. The real issue is that when you store your mission-critical data in the cloud, it’s in the hands of somebody else. Perhaps you trust them, perhaps you have an SLA that guarantees that you’ll always have access to your stored data. Perhaps they’ve promised that your data will be segregated from the other companies that use their services. But is that enough?

How much good is that SLA going to do you when you can’t get to the data you need to make your business competitive? How warm and fuzzy will you feel while your cloud provider goes through the data recovery process, or while they simply bring up their alternate site right in the middle of your work day?

My guess is that your fuzziness level will be pretty low, unless you consider a porcupine to be “fuzzy.”

But there are solutions. The most immediate that comes to mind is to make sure your access to the cloud is redundant. The next is to make sure that your cloud provider is also redundant. I’m reminded of a story I did a few years ago on the data center in the Frankfurt airport in which everything was redundant, from the servers to the power grid to the cooling water. The airport data center even had a refrigerated lake hidden away in the mountains for redundant cooling.

Chances are, you’re not going to go to such lengths. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make some kind of plans for redundancy in the storage of your mission-critical data. The easiest solution is to contract with a cloud provider that offers redundancy already, has the redundant site up all the time, and can switch to it instantly if something (like a server hardware failure) happens.

The safer solution is to have a second cloud provider, a separate and independent network connection, and the ability to choose which one you’re going to use if the other goes down. Both of these options will cost more than the bargain-basement cloud storage you’re going to find if cost is your only consideration. But think about it -- if your data is sufficiently important to store in the first place, isn’t it also important enough to be able to reach when you need it?

After all, if you back up your other business data (you DO back up your data, right?) you should do the same with what’s in the cloud. Not doing so could mean paying a much higher price in the long run – just think how much it will cost in lost productivity, customer and stockholder confidence, or regulatory fines if you lose it.