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Let’s be clear: you need to store all that data somewhere. Hard drives were your only resort a few decades ago. Today, cloud is the new frontier on the data storage land, brimming with features.

So you’ve got data stored somewhere on cloud servers – your photos on Facebook, conversations in Skype, and projects in Asana – but what happens if one of these services take a knock and your data gets wiped?

Here’s the kicker: the cloud has many benefits (affordable prices, access to massive storage, remote accessibility), but it’s not 100% foolproof. Even if you trust the most reliable cloud services with your data, things can go awry at any point and a crash/failure may permanently destroy some data.

Why is data not safe in the cloud?

Cloud data storage has worked well for long, so it’s natural to assume that everything is safe, particularly because the transfer and backup process is transparent and automatic. However, cloud data is vulnerable to the same threats as the internet as a whole. Here’s a run-down of some of those threats:

Cyber-attacks: At any time you store information in the cloud, you are at a risk for a data breach. This storage format is of particular interest to cyber criminals as large volumes of data is stored by companies and consumers on cloud servers. An attack like distributed-denial-of-service can disrupt the composition of all this data. Codespaces had to close down its business due to data loss, which was a result of the DDoS attack on its cloud storage server.

Password hacks: Mat Honan, a tech writer, lost one single password to a hack, but because his accounts were kept under the same cloud storage service (referred to as daisy-chained), the hacker was able to get into his email account using remote access and wipe all the data on his MacBook, iPhone and iPad. Everything from important documents to family photos was gone forever. The takeaway? Besides software and hardware failure, even user error with the cloud can contribute to data loss.

Server crash/failure/outage: Amazon’s EC2 cloud services crash destroyed some data on a permanent basis. While the data loss was small compared to the total data stored, it was catastrophic for some companies. Chartbeat, one of Amazon’s customers, had to inform its clients that 11 hours of historical data was deleted permanently.

Can you do something to prevent cloud data loss?

While most of the threats to cloud computing are unpredictable (and some are unpreventable), users can take steps to mitigate the loss. Here are some measures you can take when signing up for a cloud storage service:    

1.  Create unique passwords for accounts

Check the passwords you use for your accounts. Are you using the same password for different services? If you answered yes, you may be setting yourself up for data loss. Instead, use a password manager and set up different passwords for different accounts.  Password management services like LastPass and RoboForm can help you generate hard-to-guess passwords and save them on devices you frequently use to access cloud storage services. However, you will need to protect your devices as physical theft may lead to password compromise.

2.   Activate two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication may not be foolproof, but it’s an important step in securing the data stored in your accounts from threats like cyber attacks. So make sure you’ll be notified if a cyber criminal tries to manipulate your password, and if there were security questions involved in setting up a password, make sure to select obscure questions. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, WordPress (plugin required) and Amazon offer two-factor authentication to their customers.

3.  Review connected accounts

Review connected accounts with access to your cloud data. In Box and Microsoft services, for example, you can review your connected accounts under the settings menu. If there are connected accounts that you discontinued, remove them. You don’t want an account that you no longer use become the gateway for hackers to access your active account. Keep lists clean on cloud storage services and social media networks.

4.  Use an encrypted service provider

In case of highly sensitive information, it’s important to encrypt the data with a program like Boxcryptor before storing it in the cloud. Another thing you can do is select a cloud service provider that offers local decryption and encryption of your data in addition to backup and storage. It removes the need of using a data encryption program and reduces the possibility that server administrators or service providers will have access to your data (also referred to as zero-knowledge privacy).

5.  Backup to other sources

Don’t store everything in the cloud if you want to give yourself a good chance to restore data when failures and outages occur. Back up your mission critical information to a local server; while this may sound cumbersome to do, there are many applications with data export settings to make the process seamless. You can also create a few copies on external hard drives to avoid permanent data loss.

6.  Review the terms of service agreements

While terms of service agreements may appear as a burden to go through, they often include important considerations pertaining to privacy and security policies. If anything gives you a pause, ask the service provider or the customer support department what a given clause implies, or use a search engine to read opinions of others. If your cloud provider is known to update its terms and policies frequently, ask the company to notify you of the change.

These steps will minimise the chances of cloud data loss. Additionally, if there’s anything you’d hate to part with, or anything you’re worried an overzealous service provider may snoop your account over, take it off the cloud and store it on your local server.

For consumers and businesses using or considering migrating data to cloud storage, all you can do is be prepared at your best. Apart from following the tips mentioned above, get to know service providers as much as you can.

Enterprise Initiatives Episode: Our guest on the podcast this week is John Willis, Founder and VP of Customer Enablement at SocketPlane. We discuss the effort needed to implement a grassroots DevOps initiative.

Listen in to find out how to gain the essential support of leaders for your project. (Make sure you have both headphones in to hear the full audio of this episode.)

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I’ve spent the past few years looking at clouds on the ground and in the air. On the ground, I’m immersed in OpenStack’s global innovation and momentum. Doing so involves lots of time in the air, looking at literal clouds as I fly around the world talking with OpenStack developers, community members and users.
Yet most of my conversations don’t reside in the clouds. They reside squarely in reality, as users want clear answers on how OpenStack-based solutions can help with their everyday challenges. I’m fortunate to spend my time talking about the critical issues that matter, which often differs from the political, technical and governance issues we read about more frequently.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified four keys areas in which to focus for the next 15 years: Health, Farming, Banking, and Education. Bill himself holds forth on a regular basis about the challenges facing many billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, as well as the opportunities to save lives and change lives.

He does not seem naïve about the enormity of the challenges, and does not offer technology as a simple panacea to what ails the world. He also seems committed to respecting national sovereignty in implementing programs, difficult as that may be sometimes. And he seems to understand very clearly that even the vast wealth of his and his wife’s foundation and its allies cannot hope to achieve signficant results on its own.

I would add Energy, Transportation, and Government to Bill’s and Melinda’s list–aware that the Foundation supports these areas and many others as well. In our efforts at the Tau Institute, we then focus on how the Internet of Things will play a role in these areas as well as societal improvement and transformation overall. We’ve also chosen a 25-year timeframe, an thus use the term IoT 2040 to describe our activities.

Our program includes research, events, consulting, and technical education. We have four overriding goals:

1. To spur beneficial economic development in all corners of the world
2. To reduce poverty & disease
3. To curtail violence as a way of settling disputes
4. To produce political and societal leaders who will maintain progress

We think a good way to measure progress is through the research we’ve been conducting for the past few years, which creates relative,»pound-for-pound» rankings that show how well nations are doing with respect to their available resources.

Our rankings reflect a lot of time spent, by me and by our associates and advisors, living in the various corners of the world. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

The most dynamic countries should correlate well over time with those most quickly growing their economies in an equitable way.

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«People are a lot more knowledgeable about APIs now. There are two types of people who work with APIs – IT people who want to use APIs for something internal and the product managers who want to do something outside APIs for people to connect to them,» explained Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Big Data, AI, Machine Learning, Hadoop, Predictive Analytics — we hear these terms every day from companies such as Cloudera, Trifacta and Dato (formerly GraphLab) that are securing many millions in financing. I believe that 2015 will be the year when the conversation moves from Big Data to the Dataware stack. Over the past twelve months we have seen a lot of companies across the big data spectrum emerge and while the language can be the same, there are clear product categories that have emerged which describe the market opportunity and future growth.

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No, it’s not an endless loop waiting to happen, the plan here is to use Logstash to parse Elasticsearch logs and send them to another Elasticsearch cluster or to a log analytics service like Logsene (which conveniently exposes the Elasticsearch API, so you can use it without having to run and manage your own Elasticsearch cluster).
If you’re looking for some ELK stack intro and you think you’re in the wrong place, try our 5-minute Logstash tutorial. Still, if you have non-trivial amounts of data, you might end up here again. Because you’ll probably need to centralize Elasticsearch logs for the same reasons you centralize other logs.

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Remote work in ops is divisive. The perks of working from home, your local coffee shop, wherever, can be quite obvious to engineers and contributors. But some team leaders and company execs aren’t buying it. One faction sees it as a way to do better quality work. Another has watched deadlines and motivation fall by the wayside because of unresponsive remote workers.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of remote work? What should you consider before you take the plunge into flexible hours and asynchronous communication?

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Many years ago Gartner introduced their technology Hype Cycle, which maps visibility against maturity for new technology. The Hype Cycle in essence states that many new technologies get a large amount of visibility early in their maturity cycle. The visibility and enthusiasm drops significantly when reality sets in: technologies early in their maturity cycle will have low adoption rates. The vast majority of customers of technology are conservative in their choices, especially if this new technology is not (yet) fundamental to this customer’s business.

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If you’re part of the decision making process in how to get started with Big Data then you’ve probably already discovered that open source Apache Hadoop has a big lead. You also know that unless you’ve got a particularly deep NoSQL team or want to write your own proprietary code that the free open source version of Hadoop is not for the great majority of businesses. You want the benefits of open source but with some support and some capabilities that tie the open source components together in an enterprise quality database system. You want a Hadoop Distribution.

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