Week 8 Assignment

Permanent data loss is still one of the biggest fears that organizations face when opting for cloud services. Hackers would deliberately delete cloud data to harm businesses and ruin cloud providers’ reputation. Cloud data centers are also as vulnerable to natural disasters as any other facility.

Preventing data loss is a shared responsibility and cloud providers recommend distributing data and applications across multiple zones for added protection. Data backups are essential, as well as off-site data storage. When it comes to customer’s responsibilities – if encrypting data before uploading it to the cloud, then careful measures should be taken to protect the encryption key. Once the key is lost, so is the data.

On April 21^st 2011 Amazon experienced a massive service outage, causing service disruption and approximately 11 hours of historical data wasn’t recoverable and appeared as small gaps in the timeline. The root cause was a mistake made by Amazon’s engineers that triggered a cascade of other bugs and glitches. You can find a detailed description of the incident here.

There are compliance policies in place on how long organizations must retain documents and audit records. Losing such data can have serious consequences. Providers and cloud customers should take adequate measures to back up data and follow the best practices in business continuity and data recovery.

Resources:

Rashid, F., (2016, March 11), The dirty dozen: 12 cloud security threats, retrieved from http://www.infoworld.com/article/3041078/security/the-dirty-dozen-12-cloud-security-threats.html

Goldman, D., (2011, April 29), Amazon explains its cloud disaster, retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/29/technology/amazon_apology/

Blodget, H., (2011, April 28), Amazon's Cloud Crash Disaster Permanently Destroyed Many Customers' Data, retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-lost-data-2011-4