Cloud Computing Does Not Absolve a Company of Good Disaster Planning

Yes the data blowout at Microsoft’s Danger data center should have everyone taking a short sharp look at the way that they do data recovery and disaster preparedness. The problem is not so much the outage but the data loss, data loss caused because the backups didn’t work. This is not a cloud computing issue even if it was a data center; this is a disaster recovery issue.

The press is once again talking about how bad the cloud is for computing, and once again I find myself pointing out that Cloud Computing is a platform, just like the platform in a company’s data center. The only difference between the cloud and the company is that one is hosted locally and one is hosted somewhere else outside the company.

Just because the computer and operating system reside outside the company does not mean that a company can skip on backups, skip on security, and skip on the million and one things that have to happen regardless of where user data or company data resides. The problem is that the backups failed, and this is not the first time that backups have failed since computer backups were invented. This really is a matter of poor data management going mainstream, not a problem with cloud computing.

Cloud computing does mean a lower cost of operations, but it does not mean that standards and practices such as good data backup, good disaster recovery, and good system administration including testing of the backups should not be happening on a regular basis. There is no plausible way that those backups could not have been tested by spinning up a number of new VM’s and testing the backups. Backup testing is an essential part of good information security and good disaster planning. The fact that this was not done is a procedural issue, not a cloud computing issue.

While it is bad that this happened, what this points to is that we have hit a crisis point in how companies approach IT, and it might be directly driven by cost cutting measures in place because the economy is so poor. Cutting costs on IT is something that can be done, but we pay a price eventually because things do not get done when we are over working our IT staffs. The recent parade of outages, crashes, and other problems with computing in general means we might have cut too far, and it is time to hire people so that we do not burn them out, and that we can have that extra margin of safety when it comes to running our computer departments.

With this in mind, it is time to start using the standards and practices that companies have developed over the last few years and ensure that companies are completely recoverable in the event of a major outage. The recent spate of companies going down, from Mag.no.lia to the Fisher Data Center fire, and now to Microsoft’s Danger system, maybe we have gone too far, and it is time to hire some new IT Staff.