Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

The Tech industry has successfully convinced almost everyone that moving to the Cloud is the best option for them and in a lot of cases it is true. If you are a startup or trying out new idea’s or a small shot that doesn’t have a full time IT staff then it is more cost efficient and quicker to run everything on the cloud so that you don’t have to worry about it. However, remember what they say:

There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer

Once your data is on their computer you don’t really have full control of it anymore. If it is unencrypted then they can access it and depending on their terms of service use it for various purposes like training their AI models etc. If asked they can share your data with US law enforcement or others even if the server is physically not in the US. (Microsoft admitted under oath that it ‘cannot guarantee’ data sovereignty)

Another major risk is that if your account gets deleted or frozen for whatever reason then you loose all the data stored there with almost no recourse in most cases. Hacker News and Reddit are filled with threads where people have suddenly been locked out of their accounts and are desperate to get through to someone that can restore access. The latest instance of this is where Seuros who is a very prominent Open Source developer had their 10 year old account on AWS deleted without warning with no possibility of recovering the data. Then AWS tried to cover up their mistake and refused to give clear answers on the status of the data for over 20 days.

Seuros did almost everything correctly, they had a comprehensive backup strategy that:

• Multi-region replication across AWS Europe (completely separate from US infrastructure)
• Dead man’s switch implemented for disaster recovery
• Proper backup architecture following AWS’s own best practices
• Segregated encryption keys stored separately from data

But the only thing that they didn’t account for was the possibility that AWS itself would be the cause of the data loss across all the backups and redundancies. If you have data that you want to preserve you should ensure that you have a local copy of all the data no matter what service guaranty your cloud providers are giving. Nothing in the world is 100% secure/safe so if you don’t have a local copy then there is a possibility that you can loose the data permanently.

Some people will suggest instead of a local copy you can have copies on multiple cloud servers but that has a recurring cost implication to it. I would rather buy an external drive for a few hundred dollars and then periodically sync your data to it. This ensures that you have a copy of the data in your control no matter what happens to it on the server side.

If your cloud provider (Google Photos or Drive/AWS/Azure/Dropbox etc etc) is the only place you have copies of important data then you are risking complete loss of the data for something that isn’t in your control. Think about it before you put all your eggs in one basket.

– Suramya