Common Sense Cloud Strategy for Your Business

Harvard professor Harry Lewis wrote a piece in BusinessWeek last August that deserves another look. In a nutshell, Lewis argues that the convenience and cost savings of cloud computing comes at a price. You cannot simple abdicate responsibility for your data to your service providers.

One of Lewis' startling points:

Does the cloud back up your data? A typical contract stipulates that you bear "sole responsibility for adequate security, protection, and backup."

That's all nice and good from the provider's point of view. But how, exactly, are businesses and individuals supposed to accomplish this? This is exactly the problem we are solving at BackupMy.Net. Stay tuned for more information on our upcoming suite of products.

Is the Cloud A Safe Place for Your Data?

Today's Wall St. Journal has a thought-provoking article on the reliability of cloud-based infrastructure and it's rapid growth in the business world.

Let's get back to basics. There is nothing magical about "cloud infrastructure". It's still computers - processors, memory, hard drives. All that stuff still fails just as much as it did before we came up with clever and complex ways to scale these resources to meet demand.

For whatever reason, we seem to be very comfortable with the idea that we need to back up our own personal computer files. Perhaps it's because we've all seen a few to many blue screens. We can see our hard drive and how small and vulnerable it looks, trapped in the beige box that doubles as a coffee cup holder. We know that this little box with all our important documents, photos and videos might some day crash.

But if we take all those files and put them on someone else's computer, we feel somehow safer. We can't see the computer that stores the only copy of our family photos. We don't know the name of the 19 year-old who maintains the servers. We have no idea in what state, or even country, our data resides. Do they have backups? Much of the time there isn't even a phone number to call if something goes wrong.

When you start to think about it, there is a lot more uncertainty about web-based data security than there is about your own PC. So why do we not treat our cloud-based data with the same concern that we treat our own, local data?

Computers are computers. We can't get complacent just because we can't see them.

Yahoo Briefcase to Shut Down

I just got an email from Yahoo stating that Yahoo Briefcase, the online storage system, will be shutting down on March 30, 2009. For those of you still using the service, you'll have until then to retrieve your files. After the 30th, both basic and premium (paid) accounts will be deleted.

It just goes to show that service shutdowns aren't just for startups.

Gmail Goes Down

Even the mightiest of Internet companies can have a bad day. Today TechCrunch reported what many of us already knew. Gmail was not available to it's users for a period of at least several hours. This outage has apparently impacted both consumer and business accounts.

We will not likely know the reason for the outage. For one, Google has no interest in airing it's dirty technical laundry (nor should they), and it's probably a little on the technical side for most users.

But where does that leave us - the users? Are we to assume that Google will just fix these problems as they come up? What if next time Gmail is down for a couple days rather than a couple hours? What are their backup systems and how do they work?

With each passing day, it seems we find another example of why we, as a society, must take our data security into our own hands. There is simply too much that can go wrong and too much at stake if it does.

What Went Wrong at Ma.gnolia

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

Bookmarking site Ma.gnolia recently shut down due to massive data loss. Today, the man behind Ma.gnolia tells us about what went wrong in this insightful video. In it, Larry (Ma.gnolia's creator) describes openly and honestly what went wrong, why it happened, and what web service providers and consumers can do about it in the future. Some important issues brought to light by this video:

• Ma.gnolia failed due to file system corruption. Essentially, the data got messed up.
• The "not-so-awesome" backup system simply replicated that bad data. This is similar to the problem that killed JournalSpace.
• Ma.gnolia was run by a single person, although many users seemed to have thought it was a fully staffed company.
• Ma.gnolia was described as a labor of love, not a currently viable business.
• Larry thinks that "the cloud" can help solve many of these problems by easing the IT load on web service providers.
• This is a much bigger issue than just Ma.gnolia. Infrastructure is part of the solution, as are backups.

Watch the video yourself. It's a rare and candid glimpse behind the curtain, and I think Larry deserves high praise for allowing public access to what must have been a painful ordeal. Check out the original post here.

UPDATE: Ma.gnolia was working with a data recovery firm to try to save some information from those corrupted files. Unfortunately, their efforts have failed. Hopefully the service will be back up and running again soon with renewed attention to data security.

When a Service Shuts Down: Pownce & Google Video

As much as we love all the innovative web services out there, the fact remains that the significant ones are almost always businesses. Businesses, of course, have to make a profit to survive. What happens to the users when they don't?

On December 15th, microblogging site Pownce shut down its operations and their developers moved on to greener pastures at Six Apart. As startups go, Pownce had a pretty good run - they had lots of users, good press, and the promotional power of its high-profile TV-host turned startup entrepnreur, Kevin Rose. That's just the nature of the internet - sometimes even good ideas with lots of support can falter.

Pownce made some attempts to help their customers migrate to competitive platforms as they shut down. Kudos to them for making the effort - many companies wouldn't have bothered. Even so, their efforts received mixed reviews.

If you think that this "end of service" problem is unique to startups, I would ask you to take a look at the list of products that Google killed off,which includes Google Video. Google seems to have handled the Google Video shutdown in a reasonable manner. We applaud them for allowing the current videos to remain in place, only halting uploads of new videos. 

I would hope that most companies would do their best to ease the burden of their shutdowns. But just in case, a backup is probably a good idea.

Ma.gnolia.com Loses Customer Data & Backup

It's been a bad January for web businesses. First, JournalSpace lost everything. Then SoapBlox was hacked, and now Ma.gnolia.com's future is looking very grim.

After three years in business, bookmarking site Ma.gnolia has lost its customer data and will presumably shut down. Check out the screenshot above if the site is no longer available. We don't know if the backups were not done properly (as in the case of JournalSpace), or if Ma.gnolia was just exceptionally unlucky. Either way, the data is gone.

Judging by Ma.gnolia's Get Satisfaction page (by the way - Get Satisfaction is a great service), users are pretty upset.

Your Email Account Can Expire

Millions of people depend on free web-based email accounts like GMail, Hotmail, Windows Live, or Yahoo Mail. Most do not know that those accounts will be deleted if they are not used often enough. Not too long ago a Hotmail account would be completely and irreversibly erased if you did not log in for as few as 30 days. These days the allowances are longer - 120 days for Windows Live, for example. But the fact remains that your account can and will be deleted without warning if it's one you rarely check.

I know the irritation this can cause very well, as it happened to me. I had a bunch of old emails in my Hotmail account that I still wanted even though I never actually used the account to send email. The first warning I got that Hotmail had an expiration policy was the empty screen I saw when I logged in. I suppose I could have sifted through the terms of service before I signed up, but I didn't. And I bet you didn't either.

Coming Up: What's in those terms of service anyway?

SoapBlox Servers Hacked

JournalSpace was not the only small blogging operation to be compromised by hackers this January. Political blogging platform SoapBlox was broken into by hackers and as a result services were taken off line.

Hackers were able to "acquire SSH access" according to the SoapBlox press release. I'll translate that for the non-technical readers out there: the hackers had access to do pretty darn much anything they wanted from these compromised machines. It turns out that they were using the SoapBlox servers to search for and exploit vulnerabilities in other servers across the internet.

To what end? Who knows. Spam perhaps? Political vendetta? Curiosity? Nobody knows. But what we do know is that those servers not not quite so safe as we once had happily assumed.

The silver lining is that it is easy and safe to backup your data without risking attack by hackers. If your provider gets compromised, you'll have a clean copy of your data and only your data that you can move to another blogging platform. Stay tuned for more information on BackupMy.Net's upcoming backup products.

JournalSpace Fails to Backup Customer Data

JournalSpace is Dead. Long Live JournalSpace.

In January of this year the unthinkable happened to JournalSpace, the small blog hosting company. For reasons that remain somewhat unclear, they did not keep a proper backup of their users' blogs. Then, one day, 14,000 accounts going back for 6 years were wiped out. The business closed for ever. A rookie mistake to be sure, but we're talking about a six year old business!

The old JournalSpace is no more. The domain was transferred to new owners, who have managed to round up a few hundred users. What a shame.

Six years of writing - potentially millions of posts - were lost because nobody had a basic backup scheme, despite the fact that the existence of the business depended on keeping the customers' data safe.

The moral of this story is clear: You can't assume that your service provider maintains a proper backup. If your data is valuable, you must take steps protect it yourself.