A scary story about Cloud Storage

[altrenda]

On another thread, the use of Cloud based services exposed some of the dangers in keeping critical data in one place out of your control. I love the "cloud". it's made aspects of work and life easier, but there are dangers in trusting the providers to secure your data.

Here's a story that brings the point home of not having local backups of your own.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management/379660/how-boxcom-allowed-complete-stranger-delete-all-my-files

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The way I look at it....cloud storage is still safer and more reliable than local storage/local servers.

*Cloud servers are generally going to be enterprise grade servers, with redundancy and all that stuff. How many people actually go for top notch servers? Not many.

*Cloud servers are generally secured quite well, locked down, protected, patched, etc. How many people actually enforce the same with their own servers? Probably just behind a NAT router, many without managed antivirus, many go long periods of time with Microsoft updates, many not very well locked down.

*How many of us here have read about disaster with cloud servers, people losing data? Not just rumor mill stuff, but seriously how many times?
....not many of us.

...Versus...how many of us here have seen ourselves...or have read about here via other techs that work in the real world..how many times have we seen someones local server blow up, it didn't have backup, or some virus/worm came in and wiped or encrypted all their data...and they didn't have good backups.
....the answer here is...LOTS OF US...LOTS OF TIMES!

Look at the ratio here...number of "bad things" on cloud servers is small, number of "bad things" with peoples local servers or local workstation data....very high, all the time.

The common sense answer..."backup, no matter if it's local or cloud...keep copies, but cloud is still safer!"