Access to your data stored in "The Cloud"

“The online retailer Amazon has apologised for a fault in its web hosting service EC2, which knocked out many well-known websites.

EC2- Elastic Compute Cloud - provides processing power and storage to companies that do not have their own data centres.”  [Source: BBC]

Accessibility to your data can be compromised if you rely upon remote data storage, such as “The Cloud”.  As a user, you are totally reliant upon the reliability of the Cloud Service Provider.  For those who had data stored on the new Amazon Cloud, they would not have had access to their own information for a number of days.  It is important, therefore, that you back-up and have access to your data even when the Cloud is not available.

We recently experienced problems with our Internet service which took over a week for British Telecommunications to resolve.  Had we been using “The Cloud” we would not have had access to any of our material during that period.

At the IAPSC Conference in San Diego I spoke about security of “The Cloud”.  This incident with Amazon only goes to demonstrate how careful we need to be with our own information and data.