Does your cloud provider own their infrastructure?

One the biggest risks of cloud computing is not technical, but contractual, as proved by the failure of Backify, a popular online storage and backup provider, who, thanks to a falling out with their back-end provider Livedrive, ended up losing all their customers data.

Both sides are now firing public statements about who is at fault, but the end-result for their users is clear – customer data deleted, and not recoverable.

There’s not much good that can be said about the behaviour of either party. For example, Livedrive deleted all customer data then emailed the users, when they could obviously have emailed them giving some notice period first, and Backify aparantly asked Livedrive to delete their reseller account, without realising that this would delete all their customer data.

I’ve not got any easy answers about this situation, but I’ve got a couple of questions for you to ask your online service providers, whether they’re “cloud storage” or “online backup” or what we used to call “web hosting”.

  • Is this another company’s service that you are reselling?
  • Are there any third parties who can close my account or delete my data?

    • If your provider answers either of these questions with a yes, then I believe you should take a very long look at who you deal with, because the day that your provider and their provider fall out, the real loser will be you!