A shot over the bow of unsecured, poorly architected cloud storage services.
October 15, 2009 Leave a Comment
Recently, a embarrassing data loss in the consumer market has resulted in T-Mobile, Microsoft and the Sidekick shedding doubts on companies abilities to protect your data.
- T-Mobile Takes the Hit for Sidekick Data Loss. – PCWorld
- Microsoft’s Danger Sidekick data loss casts dark on cloud computing – Apple Insider
- Microsoft Red-Faced After Massive Sidekick Data Loss – PCWorld
- Sidekick users who lost their data won’t be getting it back. T-Mobile and Microsoft say the data is gone. – Information Week
- T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger data loss is bad for the cloud – ars technica
T-Mobile announced that Microsoft may be able to recover most of the data lost.
Regardless, I strongly urge anyone who stores any kind of electronic information to back it up regularly, maintain multiple copies and keep at least one of those copies off-site. One of the simplest strategies is to back up your computer to one of two or more external hard drives and rotate them off-site to some place away from your primary copy like a safe deposit box.
This is not to say that you should avoid the cloud. In actuality, cloud and storage technologies offer fantastic solutions to todays data and information management needs, wether it’s for collaboration, backup, synchronization, file sharing or picture sharing. The data is still your data and you should take responsibility and ownership of it. That’s why I backup my data utilizing multiple strategies. Just in case.
© Brian J. Greenberg. All rights reserved.
About Brian J. Greenberg
