@SmallBizCIO:
A blog aimed at the SMB, written by a long time IT enthusiast turned IT professional.
"Jack of all trades, master of none,
Certainly better than a master of one"
These are my personal opinions.
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The demise of MegaUpload - This is why TRUST is important
Today, a great article was posted on Gartner. Jay Heiser, author of the article, speculates that there will be several businesses that will have lost their backups due to the sudden death of MegaUpload.com.
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This will usually affect the SMB. For the simple reason, that in general the SMB has a tendency to be less careful with their data - part because of a lack of understanding, part because of the good old cost/benefit analysis.
Actually, the demise of MegaUpload and the possibility that several companies have been using it for backups is concerning. Many content providers are storing corporate data, knowingly or not, through contracts with smaller companies. Think about the number of companies that use the Amazon EC2 cloud to extend part of their offering. As in the case of MegaUpload, some of their storage providers were very large, legitimate companies. These companies are now rumored to remove all of the data - leaving the SMB in the dust.
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This is not the first time that a lock went on the door of a content provider. Last year, it was WikiLeaks that caused the US government to lock the doors of several providers - What if your data was backed up on these systems? Would there have been an outage, would you have noticed, or would you have lost significant uptime or, worse, data?
Furthermore, even if everything is on the up-and-up from the outside but the provider itself (service or content) disappears from one day to the other, how will you know that you will have access to your own data?
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In a previous post, I argued that ‘trust’ will be one of the four elements that will be part of the new IT. This is the perfect example of ‘why’.
If companies, through self-imposed methods or governmental programs, can provide a certificate of trust, it will be easier for the SMB segment to use the Cloud. There are several programs already in place, including programs from ISO and NIST, that are especially designed to mitigate the risks that I describe in this article.
As an SMB, I can only advise to look twice and find the right provider for you. They may cost a few dollars more but those few dollars are easily justified when looking at the cost of data loss or the loss of business continuity.
Special mention @AllenFirouz for bringing the NIST story to my attention.
Source: blogs.gartner.com
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