Cloud provider goes TITSUP? Will someone think of the data!

All well and good but

you're assuming that the insolvency goes well.

This is all assuming it's BAU while the liquidation takes place. But staff will walk if the jobs are not safe, as you said power and comm's maybe killed, building owners may refuse access, security companies may not unlock the doors and so on and so on.

And no mention if a buyer is not found at all.

And remember

If you're also using your service provider's backup solution, unless you've got your backups stored to physical media outside of your service provider, even if they have separate tape copies, the physical media probably belongs to your service provider or upstream provider, and will be a tangible asset (and thus liable to lien).

This will be true unless you've got an ironclad contract that states the media reverts to your ownership in the case of your service provider entering insolvency, If you don't, you'll probably also lose access to your physical backups as well, and possibly any archival copies kept for regulatory compliance.

Those measures are rather woefully incomplete..

If a vendor goes bust, it's not enough just to have a backup of the data - you also need something new to restore your data to or you'll have a business suspended until you do.

This is one of the reasons there have been Open Forum Europe discussions about clouds and standards: it doesn't just facilitate choice, but it also ensures you have a place to migrate to if things go wrong.

Clouds may save money, but they do so at increased levels of risk. This ought to be addressed in your Business Continuity Management planning.

Cloud Risk Mitigation

Vision Solutions has been talking about Cloud Risk Mitigation for some time, that is leveraging a secondary Cloud provider for DRaaS and I agree with some of the comments here it is all about the recovery not the back up. BCM needs to now take into account all of the additional risks that come with using the Cloud for production, making sure there is an exit strategy for when your chosen provider gets into difficulty or can no longer provide the services you need is key as well as having a DR strategy that allows you to have your systems up and running elsewhere in the event of sudden outage or insolvency.

The solution is simple...

Anything critical to your business needs to be managed with the least possible risk and that means taking ownership, not delegating responsibility and hoping for the best.

Legal remedy after the fact is all well and good, but not much help if your business has failed or incurred significant, unrecoverable losses n the meantime.

The "Cloud" is marketing speak for ...

... snakeoil.

Every Solution has Problems

Yes, if you move some or all of your IT to a cloud you need to be aware of the potential pitfalls, and yes, your provider going bankrupt is one of those, but as the article suggests there are ways to mitigate the impact of this.

However, not moving to a cloud also has its pitfalls. People who don't perform the necessary checks have been losing data since about an hour after the first electronic computer was switched on. If you do things yourself then a variety of things go wrong: your server room could burn down; your servers could break down; your sysadmins could become disgruntled and screw you over.