Cloud service gets hit by lightning

Welcome to the thunder in a series of ‘when cloud computing goes wrong’ type scenarios.

Cloud computing it touted for its reliability, scalability and stability, infact it doesn’t even need backups, but we’ll take them anyway!   Until THIS happens.

SearchStorage ANZ reports that “in late January, ma.gnolia experienced a catastrophic data loss event and turned to backups to restore its database of users’ bookmarks. Both the primary and secondary backups failed irrevocably.”

I guess it just goes to show, that your cloud is only as stable as your infrastructure, your backups are only as good as your restores, and your business is only as viable as your ability to maintain and sustain it.    Being in a cloud doesn’t make you immune to getting struck by lightning, infact it increases the likely-hood even more when you’re not grounded.

Grounded definition according to cxipedia:

Having solid foundation, connected to stable technologies, having backups and ensuring that data is recoverable from them.

I’m sure if they had a shadow test/dev environment they could have rebuilt from that, but I guess that’s just my sensibilities coming through. grin.